


lambs and knives

by jdphoenix



Series: drabble collections [3]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Drabble Collection, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-02
Updated: 2017-11-05
Packaged: 2018-06-05 20:15:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 40
Words: 42,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6721735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jdphoenix/pseuds/jdphoenix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Various Hive/Jemma fics too short to warrant individual postings. Lots of warnings probably apply.</p><p>Updated 11/5 with chapters 26-40.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. recovery mission

**Author's Note:**

> Most of these will have been posted previously on tumblr, but a few will be brand new drabbles that weren't appropriate for there for whatever reason.

There’s nothing for her to do in the monitor room. She’s made all the analysis she can of the Inhuman given the data the team’s been able to collect and, seeing as no further data _or_ communication is coming in, she leaves for the medical bay.

It’s not much of one, honestly. Zephyr One is mainly for the containment of volatile Inhumans and, as such, the bulk of its medical supplies are connected to the pods. But it will have to do, as the others will no doubt return (and they _will_ return, they  _must_ ) in need of care.

(The fight, last they saw of it, was not going well.)

She’s just set foot inside, ready to begin the task of setting up to receive the injured, when the alarm sounds. The bright red lights on the wall barely turn on before they and _all_ the lights cut off. The entire plane _lurches_ and even though they’re parked firmly on solid ground, Jemma can’t help the way her heart leaps into her throat.

Fitz and Coulson will be worried about her; she needs to return to the monitor room immediately before they endanger themselves hunting her down - but first …

The emergency lights have come on, brighter here than they will be elsewhere, though still distinctly eerie. She can see the path to the emergency medkit in the back and hurries to grab it from its absurdly high shelf.

She’s in the middle of reaching when a warm body steps up behind hers and a well-muscled arm reaches past her own to pull the bag down easily. She expects it to be one of the agents - Perez or Taylor, perhaps. 

It’s not them.

“Need some help?”

She skitters away like a frightened rabbit, back slamming against the cupboards and eyes fixing on-

 _No_. It _can’t_ be.

Ward tips his head curiously, like she’s done something of particular interest by leaping away from the man who _tortured_ her when last they met. His wide eyes sparkle and the points of his faint smile curl higher.

“But it _can_ ,” he says, and she knows instantly that he hasn’t just guessed her thoughts, he’s _heard_ them. He wanders - that’s the only word for it; a predator he may be, but he has no cause to stalk prey he’s already caught - closer to her. “More or less,” he adds. “Do you like my new host?”

He sounds dreadfully earnest in the question and looks down as if to take in the body for himself.

“I wanted to keep the last one - I know how you liked it - but you liked this one too, didn’t you?” He smiles and reaches for her. 

She presses her back flush against the cabinets to avoid his touch as long as possible. The handles dig into her side just below her ribs and it does her no good at all because, inevitably, his fingers cup her cheek. 

That smile grows and she suddenly can’t believe she ever thought he was Ward. His eyes drift half-shut as he savors the contact.

“What do you want?” she asks. She considers hunting for a way out, but that would be useless. He’s already proven he can read her thoughts as easily here as he did on the planet. Her best bet is to wait for Coulson and Fitz to - as she knows they will - fear for her safety and come looking.

He considers the question seriously, but uses the time he takes in mulling it over to step closer still. He lifts her chin to meet her eyes steadily. “World peace,” he says without the least bit of irony. “And everything that was promised to me.”

“What was-”

He cuts her off with warm lips over hers. She freezes at the contact. His fingers move from her chin into her hair and he _must_ be using the same manipulations on her that he used on the team trapped in the base because as he pours more attention into her, it becomes harder to think beyond the pressure of his lips and the teasing of his hands and the way his body fits against hers. The pain at her back lessens not because he pulls her away from the cabinet, but because she moves into him, returning the kiss in equal measure.

“Simmons!”

She gasps away. That’s Coulson - and Fitz, she can just see him in the doorway - arriving as predicted. The creature stands between her and them and he smiles still, his hands tight on her arm and in her hair.

“Get away from her!” Coulson orders, his gun aimed levelly at the creature’s back. His only reason for not having fired yet must be fear he’ll injure her.

The creature tips his head again in that way that is so unlike Ward and then Jemma wants to scream but _can’t_ because her entire body is- it’s- she’s not certain what happens to her. She can still feel him holding onto her but at the same time she feels herself shattering, breaking apart into a million pieces, and when she comes together again, an eternity later, she’s not on Zephyr One any longer.

He’s still with her though and releases her slowly, allowing his hands to linger on her as long as possible before falling away. They’re in a pale room filled with haphazardly stacked books and all too many TV screens and a single bed. There’s only one door and something about the place makes her think of a prison.

“Only if you make it one,” he says. “My advice? Don’t.”

That sounds more like Ward. It doesn’t comfort her in the least.

 


	2. I don't want your pity

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Originally the prompt - "I don't want your pity, I want your absence" - was supposed to be for a Ward/Simmons fic, but I got permission from the prompter to do this instead. That said, there's still a little bit of W/S in here.

He can read her thoughts - more clearly than he can read those of anyone else around them. Not that the others are muddled, but Jemma’s mind was his for so long, he can fit into it like a well-worn shoe and she doesn’t even notice. But it’s not the same.

He liked to hear her speaking on the planet. She filled valleys and deserts with her voice and now … silence. It’s the only weapon she has against him (he thinks he might have hurt her feelings when she slashed at him with a broken bit of glass from their dinner tray and he only laughed in delight) and she wields it so _well_ ; he’d be impressed if he weren’t so annoyed.

He twists her hair between his fingers and gives it a little tug. Her own annoyance flares, but only barely. The invasion is a middling thing when he keeps her ever at his side like a favored pet.

He wants _more_.

A falsely apologetic hissing sounds in his mind. “Ouch.” There is no space, no physical matter involved, but he hears footsteps, and though he is lounging on the bed beside Jemma (who sits, as ever, as stiffly as she can, refusing to relax save when sleep claims her), he has the momentary impression that he is standing inside the well of his own skull and a shadow hovers at his back. “That’s gotta sting.” 

He scowls. The voice enjoys this far too much. 

He doesn’t know where it came from - it never once bothered him in the weeks of his recovery, but one day, as if from nowhere, there it was. He first heard it chuckling beneath his own laughter when Jemma threatened him with the glass and it has not gone away in all the time since. It mocks him and provides colorful commentary for his every failed attempt to entice Jemma’s notice.

“I do not want your pity,” he thinks angrily, and curses himself for it; the voice does so love to be acknowledged.

“Oh? And what do you want, big guy? Other than the obvious-” 

Against his will, his eyes trace Jemma’s curves and the memory of touching her, carried from his last host, burns bright in his mind. His hand moves across the blankets, eager for a more immediate taste of her.

“-because that ain’t happenin’.”

“I want you _gone_!” he thunders, and Jemma jumps so violently she comes down in a crouch off the side of the bed.

Her terror is ice crackling along his nerves. At least he has her notice.

Her mouth opens, the prudent thought of asking if he wants her to leave warring with her resolution not to grant him the gift of her voice.

He sighs and saves her the trouble with an extended hand. She’s shaking but her chin is hard and her spine straight as ever when she drops her fingers into his palm like a queen accepting her due.

He tugs and she falls stiffly into his arms. He arranges her within the circle of them, her back to his broken ribs, and brushes her hair aside so he can rest his face in her neck without discomfort. 

“Sleep,” he orders, his eyes already back on the screens.

It’s like hugging a rock and it is only a few moments before his annoyance brings the voice back from whatever dark corner it hides in.

“You might wanna try having them install a punching back in here,” it muses, all casual arrogance. “She always loved when I did that; never made a single breakthrough while I was doing my morning workout.”

His grip on her tightens until her frightened thoughts emerge as a noise of distress. He loosens his arms and drops a kiss beneath her ear in apology. Her disgust oozes across the bridge between their minds, mixed with guilt that she would have welcomed such attentions from this body once.

She will again. He swears it.

The voice laughs.

 


	3. ficlets

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In addition to being too short to post on their own, there are too short to warrant their own chapters.

She wished she understood what it meant when he looked at her like that. (Of course, if she were going to bother with wishes, she’d wish him dead - or, at the very least, still stranded on that hell, and she wouldn’t turn up her nose at Will being returned to her in his place.)

Whatever it meant, she was accustomed to it by now and didn’t let it intimidate her into backing away, didn’t allow his presence here to frighten her into running when the tide of the battle began to turn. And that was her own mistake because when the agents flanking her were shot down, she was left alive - _kept_ alive - and dragged back to whatever hole HYDRA was operating out of these days.

He didn’t give her long to languish in her cell before he came down, still wearing the same look he’d worn every time they’d crossed paths since he came to Earth wearing a traitor’s skin. It took all her self-control not to let him back her into the wall when he stepped right into her personal space - and even more when his fingers brushed her hair and he said, in a voice that was all too familiar, “I’ve been looking forward to seeing you again, Jemma.”

 

 

\-----

 

 

Jemma’s far away. Continents and oceans between them. A billion bodies and minds all _thinking_ and _feeling_ in the space that separates him from her. But still, she’s practically right beside him compared to the gulf of stars he had to endure for the last few months.

Malick thinks he’s lazy, compares him in his most private (heh) thoughts to a teenager on summer break, sleeping all day, barely moving even to eat and then in huge amounts that leave the cupboards bare. But the truth is that he’s only listening.

He watches too - studies the footage from every corner of the globe, catches himself up on how little humanity’s advanced since he’s been gone - but he forever has one ear turned to the steady, chaotic tumble of Jemma’s thoughts.

She mourns Will. She hates him for taking the body he craved for fourteen long years - the body he craved even more when it became _hers_ and _she_ became _its_. 

She hunts Inhumans with her team and studies them and learns of the advances his people have made in his absence, and through her he learns as well. 

But thanks to the turn of the world - so much more sensibly balanced than that other one - those thoughts are at night and it is during his days that she sleeps and dreams and oh, her _dreams_. He drinks them in, drowns in them. She dreams of Will, alive and returned to her. She has nightmares about this body, about its hands on her and its voice scaring her worse than the pain it inflicted. 

She has nightmares about him. She dreams of the planet, of being stranded there in Will’s place, and of being utterly, completely at his mercy.

She wakes crying from those and he twists in his soft blanket, soaking up the sound of her fear and her empty promises to herself that he’s dead. 

He cannot wait to taste her reaction when she finds him alive and very much present in her safe haven of a world.

 

 

\-----

 

 

This blood is on Jemma’s hands. Literally, yes, because she did at least _try_ to save Sonja’s life, but she means it more figuratively.

“This is my fault,” she says. 

There’s a voice in her ear - she thinks it might be May - telling her that _no_ , it’s _not_ , she has to _fight that feeling_ , but it’s a tiny thing against the crushing weight of her guilt and it cuts out when rough fingers pull the comm away.

“Yes,” It says, Ward’s voice made smooth and soft under its control. “It is.”

She turns her head to find it squatting beside her amid the rubble. She’s still on her knees from trying to hold Sonja together. Her jeans are soaked with blood.

“It’s my fault you’re here,” she says. She’s not sure if it’s the tears stinging her eyes or the beginnings of a true panic attack making her throat tight, but her heart is starting to pound and her breath is growing short. “If I hadn’t been taken- If Fitz hadn’t tried to save me-”

It nods, sympathetic, and holds her head between its hands. “It is,” it says again. “ _You_ are the cause of all of this.” Its voice seems to take in the whole room and she doesn’t need freedom of movement to remember the wreckage, the innocent lives that were snuffed out here only minutes ago by its own power.

Tears are rolling silently down her cheeks now and the press of her guilt is making it difficult to think of anything else. There’s It though. It brushes her hair back from her face and she can focus on that instead, on the feel of warm fingers in her hair and gently soothing pressure. She wraps her fingers around its wrists, desperate to anchor it here. If It leaves, there won’t be anything but the pain of what she’s done.

“They won’t understand,” it says. “They’ll always blame you.”

A sob nearly chokes her. It’s right. No one’s looked at her the same since they discovered It had returned. It’s worse than the weeks they spent pretending not to blame her for falling in love while she was away because at least then she had hope to warm her.

She clings tighter to It, afraid suddenly that it will slip away the same way Will did.

Its mouth curves into a small smile. “Come with me.” It bends close, resting its forehead against hers in an approximation of intimacy. “I’ll never leave you the way they have. And I’ll only ever thank you for what you’ve done.”

Her hands leap from its wrists to the front of its shirt, clutching and burrowing in so it won’t ever be rid of her. Its arms wrap around her and lift her up, away from the gore.

“Let’s go home,” it says as she falls into its side, still crying.

 

 

\-----

 

 

“You’re not Will,” she says. There are tears stinging her eyes and a lump in her throat, but her voice is impressively steady even to her own ears.

He- _It_ goes on trailing its - _Will’s_ \- fingers along the bookshelf, compressing the bent tops of spines, feeling the embossing of worn titles. “No,” it says in a voice that sounds so much like Will but so much not at the same time.

She thought nothing could be worse than the moment the bottle broke. It felt like she shattered with it, a million pieces of used-to-be-Jemma scattered in the winds of this hell. But she was proven wrong hours ago when Fitz’s fingers slipped through hers and she was left here. Stranded. Again.

This is worse than both together. 

She feels sick thinking of those hands on her, pulling her to the safety of the cave. She took comfort in them, thinking they were Will’s, let them lift her from the ground and suffuse warmth back into her chilled arms after the hours proved the portal wasn’t opening again. 

How could she not have _known_?

“Give him _back_ ,” she demands, though the lump in her throat cracks on the last word and it sounds more like a plea.

It turns its head - so, so different from her Will - and it sounds almost sorry to say, “I can’t do that.”

“You _can_ ,” she insists. “You took him, you- you _invaded_ him. You can _give him back_.”

It shakes Will’s head and that’s the last straw somehow. That this is _Will’s_ head and  _Will’s_ body and every single bloody thing It’s doing, it does at his expense. She charges, no thought in her head except to _harm_ , to _hurt_.

Will’s stronger than her though and for all her training with May, she’s too emotional to do better than a poor showing. It catches her in arms that are so familiar, against a chest she knows so well.

“Give him back,” she says again, pathetically. She doesn’t care, suddenly, about the portal or Fitz or home. She just wants _Will_.

Familiar hands brush her hair back from her face. Calluses she knows as well as her own scrape her jaw as It tips her head up.

The face is right too but the expression is all wrong. Will never looks at her like this, like she’s a bug under her own microscope. When he looks at her, it’s always been like he felt lucky just to be looking.

Something in the vicinity of her heart snaps and she thinks of all the weeks and months she had with him, but wasted on futile attempts to get home.

As it bends Will’s head to kiss her, she forces herself to remain where she is. She doesn’t pull back or push away, even though she wants to. If It wants to play games with her, fine, she’ll let it, just so long as she can stay close. 

She’ll find a way to tear it out of Will if she has to use her bare hands.

 

 


	4. kiss ficlets

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay so, obviously all the chapters in this fic pretty much come with some warnings given that Hive is a creep with mind powers. The first drabble in this chapter comes with an extra big **WARNING** for that.

 

**spine kiss**

 

Jemma wakes slowly. She didn’t always wake like this, like she’s swimming up from the bottom of the deep, deep lake of her dreams, but it’s been so long since the last time she came awake quickly, with all the fervor of an agent ready for the day’s trials, that she can hardly remember it happened, let alone _how_.

As it is, by the time she blinks and focuses on the pastel walls of her prison (it is a very nice prison, she must say, everything she could want except an unlocked door) she’s forgotten what woke her.

She’s puzzling over it and considering going back to sleep when the warm spot on her hip moves, sliding along her side and then under her to cup her breast. She hums, pleased by the contact before she can question its presence at all.

“Good morning,” a voice rumbles, the sound shivering through her arse and back. A rough kiss follows it, pressed to the base of her spine. Then another, slightly higher, and another. She arches into them, at the same time allowing the hand on her breast better access, and finds herself rolled to her back beneath-

“Ward?” she asks, his name slightly slurred. The warm pleasure that’s suffused her veins for … well, for as long as she can readily recall, is not so smooth anymore, there’s a worry beneath it - it might even be a fear.

“No,” he says and brushes her hair back from her face. “He’s gone.” He lowers over her to press fresh kisses to the curve of her neck. “He won’t hurt you again.”

She doesn’t know what that means but the worry and the question are easily pushed aside by the knee slotted between her legs. She presses down into it and up against him. Her hands tug at his clothes but they won’t move the way she wants; she’s weak and already her breathing’s growing heavy from the meager exertion. 

He ends off his kissing with a nuzzle to the curve of her neck. The knee slides down, leaving her feeling empty at its loss, and his weight settles over her.

“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting so long,” he says, and her mind jumps back. She’s been waiting? Yes, Malick locked her in here after … after … 

He slides his hands into her hair, sending her thoughts tumbling.

“But you’ll have to wait a while longer, just until your mind’s clear again.”

She pouts and pushes into him. The eager heat he brought with him is far better than the tepid happiness she’s been swimming in lately; she wants _more_.

“I know,” he says, “but it’s no fun for me if you’re not fully _here_.” He taps her temple with his thumb. “Soon though,” he promises. He looks over his shoulder and she hears the familiar sound of a tray being wheeled in. She whines when he pushes off her and to his feet. “Rest, eat, and when Malick’s drugs are out of your system, we’ll revisit this.”

She does as he says, but has forgotten his visit entirely by the time she finishes her meal.

 

 

 

**stomach kiss**

 

Jemma can’t sing, her voice cracks horribly when she tries, but she _can_ hum and he seems to like that. Usually. At the moment, her humming only seems to egg him on in his use of her bladder as a punching bag.

She is _not_ going to the bathroom again. She literally _just_ went five minutes ago. And, as her trips to relieve herself are a production requiring no fewer than three armed guards, she’d really rather not make a spectacle of herself again.

She tries to focus on the screens affixed to the wall and not on the pressure building low in her belly. She’s so determined to think of nothing else, that she doesn’t even notice the discussion happening in front of the door has cut off until the Inhuman is there, kneeling beside the bed. She tenses as he draws a hand slowly over her stomach. The kicking stops.

Her heart flies into her throat - _any_ movement is better than none at all, what if he-

“He’s fine,” he says and presses a kiss to the curve of her stomach before laying an ear over it. He smiles languidly at her. “I only told him to stop pestering his mother.”

There are a million questions bubbling up in her throat, most driven by horror that the creature is apparently _communicating_ with her unborn child, but what she asks is only, “He’s all right?”

His smile grows. “Eager to be born.” He slides forward, twining his fingers easily in her hair to hold her in place for a kiss. “It won’t be long now,” he promises, “before our son enters the world.” He tips his head to one side. “I intend to lay it at his feet.”

When he walks away, she passes her hand over her stomach to wipe away all the places he touched. Her legs curl in close. It’s not his. It doesn’t matter how many times he says it or what Malick and his men think happened on that planet or even that he’s wearing the real father’s face, this baby is _hers_ and hers alone.

She takes up humming old songs from her teenage years again, hoping to get a reaction from her child.

 

 

 

**a kiss given to the wrong person**

 

Around her, everyone is embracing, but Jemma can’t shake the horrible well of dread in the pit of her stomach. Part of her knows that when she looks through the containment unit’s window she won’t see-

Will.

He’s spread out on the tiny cot, looking even filthier than she remembers against the sterility of the pod, but that’s barely a passing thought as she’s already around the corner, through the door, kneeling next to him.

“Will!” she gasps through her tears and takes his face in her hands to kiss him.

His eyes meet hers and what she sees in them only registers when it’s too late, when her mouth is already on his and one of his hand is in her hair and it feels like a sandstorm is flying past her lips. There’s a moment of terror and then-

Strong fingers knead at the back of her head, his tongue sweeps over hers, eager, wanting. The storm settles, melting into her and leaving her warm and pleasantly heavy like after a good nap. He drags his lips from hers to whisper rough words in her ear and a shiver travels down her spine.

He collapses, exhausted, but his knuckles lean against her cheek as though he’s loath to end the contact. He’s weak from so long away; he _needs_ her.

She stays by his side, taking charge of tending his injuries so the others won’t notice the impossible extent of them. His eyes, ancient and knowing, follow her everywhere and she knows her blushing only sells the lie.

He’s not Will, but he’s brought him back for her in his own way and, in return, she’ll keep him safe until he’s ready for whatever comes next.

 


	5. taking a bath together

He kisses her deeply almost the moment he’s through the door, but _only_ almost; there’s still just enough time to see the blood. And, even if there weren’t, she’d feel it, wet and warm and sticky on the hands that cup her face and dig into her hair. He drinks deeply of her, holding the kiss until her lungs burn and she has to cling to him or fall gracelessly to the floor. 

Her blood roars in her ears and slowly it lessens until she can hear the beat of his heart and the reports his people give on the rest of the mission. It’s valuable intel, which she’ll need when rescue comes for her, but her skin is crawling and at the moment she _needs_ , more than anything, to be clean.

She pushes back - not far, not with his hand still kneading gently at the back of her head - to tip her face up to his. Immediately he looks away from Giyera, giving her his full attention.

It has nothing to do with her, it’s all a show of power and carelessness for even his own people. That doesn’t stop his focus from sending a shameful thrill through her.

“We should get you cleaned up,” she says, her thumbs hooking around the buttons of his coat. 

He grins and, without another word to the others, accompanies her into the bathroom adjoining their- _his_ suite.

Once in the warm water, she uses the sponge to wipe away the blood staining his skin. She tries - tries _so hard_ \- but she can’t help but wonder if it belongs to someone she loves. The water feels cold suddenly and she bites her lip to stop it trembling.

He catches her chin in his fingers, forcing her to look at him. She hasn’t made it above his chest yet and the spot of blood at his hairline seems to mock her. “It was an Avenger,” he says.

It shouldn’t be a relief - the past tense especially should horrify her - but her body goes limp all the same. He catches her and takes the sponge to wipe at her skin while he cradles her. 

He left plenty of bloody stains behind when he undressed her. She has to wonder if that was his design, so that he can now take his time removing them. He knows all the secret paths past her defenses (whether due to experience or Will’s memories, she refuses to determine) and very soon her skin is buzzing and the water feels positively steaming.

He has her between his legs, her back to his chest, and his breath feels lovely and cool against her face when he speaks. “It will be over soon,” he says as he slides the sponge down her stomach. His eyes are impossibly dark - if it weren’t so very on the nose, she’d call them inhuman - but there’s a mischief and a glee there that she thinks she recognizes. She wants to catch it and keep it there.

She surges up, meeting him in a kiss far more satisfying than the one that he delivered upon arriving home. 

It’s not until later that she realizes the end he meant wasn’t hers, but the war’s.

 


	6. *patching up a wound

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The star means that, for once, there is nothing especially creepy about this chapter. (I know, I'm shocked too.)

Malick spots the blood when they get out of the car and starts yelling for medical. Alveus doesn’t require it, of course, but he allows it all the same, eager to see what sort of treatment these people will give him.

He’s offered a wheelchair, refuses, and is escorted swiftly to a pristine laboratory. 

“It’ll be just a moment,” the woman stationed there says. Her back is to them, but her voice is enough to stir memories in him. New memories.

He doesn’t listen to Malick’s blustering demands that she see them _now_ , he’s too busy drowning in hurt and hate and resentment. And, when she does turn, he sees she is similarly affected.

“Ward,” she gasps, fear driving her back a step. The last time she faced this body, he was holding a gun to her head and it was only some small, inconceivable act of mercy that allowed him to let her scurry back to her masters in HYDRA.

Malick explains and Alveus, while watching her attentively, does what comes naturally and removes his shirt. Grant Ward did so almost on instinct whenever he entered the Bus’s lab after a fight and he allows that instinct to drive him now.

The sound she makes when he exposes his chest is most gratifying. There is part of him, part of Grant Ward, which enjoys her pain, even if it is on his behalf.

“What happened?” she asks, rushing to him. Her gloved hands flutter over his chest and, when one of them dares land, a great crack sounds as one of his ribs finally falls entirely out of place. She jumps - literally jumps in the air and he half-reaches for her as amusement stirs in him. He cannot feel pain, this body is beyond that now, and to show her there’s no trouble, he produces Coulson’s hand for her examination.

She hefts it in both of hers, looks from it to his chest to him. Her mind spins away faster than he can track and he can see now what he couldn’t before, how she is so accomplished a liar. She may slip from time to time, speaking before her brain can stop her (and how many of those times did he agonize over in the months after her betrayal came to light? How many did he berate himself over not seeing for what they really were?) but then she’s ready with the excuse in the next breath. A pained smile, an apologetic glance. It isn’t _her_ fault science is so fascinating - and so bloody.

She examines him carefully but he can see the conclusion she reached when she first saw his injuries and is not nearly so surprised as Malick when it’s delivered.

“He shouldn’t be alive,” she says. “I- I don’t know how to fix him.”

“You fixed John Garrett, didn’t you?” Malick demands bitterly. 

Yes, she did. She nearly got them all killed doing it, and all for her precious super soldier serum.

He wonders how her work on that has altered since she’s become aware of his people.

“I had the DNA of a ten thousand year-old alien then,” she snaps, “now I have the meager resources you’ve afforded me.”

Malick turns an ugly shade of red and looks about ready to have her head removed for that. From the reactions of the guards standing by, they expect nothing less, and Jemma certainly looks as though she anticipates a swift death.

Alveus cuts easily through the tension in the room by taking her by the chin and turning her to face him. She stares up at him in precisely the way she did so many times before, times when he felt guilty for leading her on when he knew she felt more for him than he did for her. But she was fun to be around, the only one he could talk to without being constantly on his guard.

Or so he thought.

Grant Ward hated this woman. He also loved her. 

Alveus kisses her forehead and she pulls in a breath, precisely the way she did at Providence before he left her behind to aid the others in Portland. There is no pleasure in it for him beyond the memory - a body that is beyond pain is beyond its opposite as well - but that is enough, enough that Malick’s thoughts of murder ebb and Jemma’s lively mind shudders to a halt.

He leaves them both for the hall, where he waits to be escorted to wherever he will be staying while he recuperates. Malick will not dare touch her after that, which means Alveus may take his time recovering, secure in the knowledge that he may decide at his own leisure which of Grant Ward’s warring emotions most encapsulates his own opinion of Jemma Simmons.

 


	7. rescue

Jemma remembers all too well the sight of Banks’ gun turning on him - and Coulson must remember that part of her report just as clearly because he’s releasing the magazine from his sidearm as well, tossing them both away.

The telekinetic only smiles as a chain drags along the floor behind him.

“This is gonna be fun,” Coulson says, echoing his own words when they left Zephyr One. At the time, she doubted it but appreciated his attempt to make their foray into almost certain death seem like a father-daughter bonding exercise. Now it is, at best, a weak defense against the growing certainty that they’re doomed.

The comms are still up and she can hear the others fighting that _thing_ \- the creature that returned to Earth wearing Ward’s face; from the sound of it, things are not going well.

The chain flies through the air. Jemma ducks but Coulson does more than that. He rushes the telekinetic. Perhaps it’s use of his powers, perhaps it’s the cry Jemma gives when the chain strikes the machinery behind her and sends up sparks - whatever the cause, the telekinetic is caught off guard. Coulson manages one sickening punch with his artificial hand and another, less jarring, with his right before the telekinetic comes enough to his senses to throw Coulson bodily into a wall.

“Coulson!” Jemma yells. She moves for him, to check his injuries, but the chain holds her back. It snakes around her from behind, pulling her into the machinery and holding her there so tightly she’s certain something will break - likely it will be her.

The telekinetic slumps after that, breathing heavily. Coulson managed to do him some serious damage; he’s bleeding profusely from a head wound, his shirt already soaking from it. It takes long moments for him to pull himself to his feet, moments Jemma spends torn between her present terror and her fear for her friends. There is a great deal of screaming and crying out coming over the comms at the moment; they don’t seem to be faring better than her and Coulson.

She makes a weak struggle against the chains, but they hold fast and she has nothing to do but wait for Malick’s lapdog to act.

“You didn’t break me,” she says as coolly as she’s able when he comes near. Not even Ward could manage that, a fact of which she will be forever proud - even if forever is only the next few minutes.

He leans one hand beside her head and lets out a pant of breath that splatters her with his blood. She turns her face away and the chains tighten until she looks at him again. Her heart is beating wildly, both from her current proximity to the man who personally tortured her and from the sudden silence on the comms. Neither is promising.

“I hate to leave a job unfinished,” he says. When the chains start to tighten again, she’s certain they’re not going to stop. They grow tighter and tighter and in her head is nothing but white noise and a roaring and then-

She falls into strong arms and pulls in deep, gasping breaths. Around her, the air is whipping past in a torrent, but where she is, it’s almost calm. It eases at almost the same pace her senses come back and the first thing she sees is the telekinetic. He’s fallen against the wall in an odd mirror of Coulson’s position and is staring at her in what can only be described as horror. 

No, not at _her_. At something above her. At whoever is holding her.

Hope - that it will be _anyone_ else - is barely an ember in her chest and is quickly stomped out as she faces- not Ward, not anymore, but the creature from the planet wearing his face. Its hand falls away from her ribs as she straightens, but the one on her back - the one she realizes has been making soothing motions all this time - is slower to leave her.

It smiles and the sincerity of it makes her gut twist. Her back hits the machinery yet again, anything to put a little distance between her and the monster that killed Will.

“I’ve missed you,” it says in an eerie voice that sounds wholly unlike Ward. It reaches for her face and comes close and disgust wells up in her as it keeps coming closer still-

A shot rings out and it jerks, nearly falling onto her but bracing itself against the machinery - caging her in - at the last moment. Its head turns and she’s honestly shocked when it keeps to the laws of physics rather than going in a complete 180. 

“Back away from her,” Coulson says, still from his spot on the floor, his gun still leveled at it, “nice and slow.”

Even from this angle, Jemma can see the ugly way its face twists. Its hand slips down to her shoulder, giving her a brief squeeze, and then the sandstorm is back. This time Jemma feels every bit of it and can only hold her position or be swept away.

When it ends, the creature is gone; the telekinetic is either dead, unconscious, or just doing a fair job of pretending; and Coulson is nowhere to be seen.

 


	8. icarus falling

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After 3x18 I had way too many AU ideas for that hallway scene and one of them was a super extra-AU follow-up to my fic, [you have to walk before you can fly](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5444549). It isn't required reading before this drabble and this is definitely an AU for that 'verse since I always imagine that ending with Will coming home and a happily ever after.

Jemma is wearing no less than a dozen trackers and three comms devices - all of which have been rendered useless by the EMP that odious woman set off. Her gun too is gone; she was relieved of it by the guard who dragged her from the operating room. There’s a blade in her shoe as well, but reaching it will be awkward and likely give anyone she plans on attacking a good idea of what’s to come.

That’s not all the others wanted, but it was all they could reasonably conceal. And, at the time, she’d rolled her eyes and allowed it to happen, all the while thinking it was overkill. She would be in no danger at all - at least not from Hive, who was sure to be out causing who knows what mischief with the newly brainwashed Daisy.

Well, as it turns out, he’s causing mischief _here_. And Jemma is without the slightest defense.

It’s frightfully easy to ignore the steaming pile of bones that was only moments ago a human being, and focus instead on the monster advancing towards her. She can’t seem to tear her eyes away from him, not when she expects any moment to be the last during which she’ll enjoy her free will.

“Stay away from me,” she warns. “If you try to hurt me, I swear-”

“Take it off,” he says and her feet catch on the carpet beneath her, bringing her to a sudden stop. His eyes smile. “The jacket. I’d like to see them.”

 _Oh, Daisy_ , she thinks sadly. She suspected he’d have some sense to tell she’d gone through terragensis since returning to Earth, but the knowledge of precisely how she’s been changed can only come from one person.

“No,” she says firmly. For as long as she’s able, she will refuse to bow to his wishes.

He tips his head, looking more amused than put out. “Jemma,” he says gently and her breath catches in her throat. That’s not Ward’s voice. “Please. I’d only like to see the real you.”

She agonized for _weeks_ over what Will might think of her wings, whether he’d still want her with them, and it turned out all to be for nothing. Hearing now his plea - even one only pretending to be him - brings back all her worries and sadness at once.

She turns her shut eyes away from him, too overwhelmed to keep him in sight - and it turns out to be a mistake because the next thing she knows, his fingers are curling around the collar of her jacket.

“I only want to see,” he says softly, his breath stirring her hair. Her heart pounds in her chest and she can only stand numbly while he pulls the jacket from her shoulders.

He _tsks_ under his breath when he sees the brace keeping her wings in place. The release is beneath her breasts - _to be easier in a fight_ , Fitz said hopefully when he presented it to her - so she doesn’t know how he gets it undone so cleanly, but the pressure snaps and simple comfort has her unfolding them.

She doesn’t get to spread them out much, not in the Playground’s cramped spaces, and for a moment she forgets what’s even happening in the rare pleasure of stretching out.

But only a moment.

“Beautiful,” he breathes. She feels his fingers brushing the edges of her feathers and a shiver goes through her. She tries to turn, but the mechanics of it are too awkward in this position and he easily crowds her, keeping her in place. He brushes her hair aside and she feels the faint brush of his skin on her shoulder like a firebrand. That’s nothing to the feel of his lips over the same spot when he says again, “Beautiful.”

She should stop him. She should use her wings for something good like slamming him back against the opposite wall. She tries to convince herself to do just that as he kisses his way down her back, but for some reason her body refuses to do anything more than make embarrassing sounds as he speaks more endearments into her skin.

When he reaches the narrow strip of flesh between her wings, she has to press her palms against the wall for support and all her futile thoughts of resistance fly out of her head. She never thought of her spine as a particularly erogenous zone, but apparently the transformation included the addition of a new one.

His hand snakes around and beneath her shirt to cup her breast while his hips rock against hers and he leaves what are sure to be deeply embarrassing marks between her wings. Her forehead rests against the cool of the wall but it does nothing to break the heat spreading through every inch of her. She rocks her hips back into his, wishing for more contact, more skin on skin. He straightens to slip his knee between her legs, affording her some much needed pressure, and she whines both at it and the end of his kisses on her back.

She hears a faint breath like a chuckle as he pulls her back against his chest. She shouldn’t be, not after so little, but she’s almost there and she thinks if she could just press down a little more, if he would only drag his thumb over her nipple again…

His hand moves up her neck, tipping her head back against his shoulder and the edge of his smile slides like a knife along her cheek. “My Jemma,” he says. It’s not the first time he’s said it, but it’s the first time the possessive quality of it registers. “One of my sacrifices. One of my people.” She has no idea whose voice it is he’s using this time and doesn’t care because when his fingers pull her mouth open to slide inside, they aren’t fingers anymore at all. He fills her up and her vision whites out as she comes.

When it clears, she’s laying in his arms on the floor like Icarus after flying too close to the sun, only she’s alive and the sun is close enough to touch. She reaches up to do just that and he smiles while her fingertips trace his brows.

She knows it’s a chemical reaction, that she’s an addict and he’s the drug, but it doesn’t do a thing to crack the sheer joy she feels when he smiles at her.

 


	9. I need this (Absolution AU)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There will probably be an embarrassing amount of s3 finale AUs from me concerning these two, but for now I'm starting here. A while back shineyma prompted "I need this" and I finally found the best way to use it. <3

Jemma can’t stop seeing May’s horrified face. Her heartbroken expression when she saw what Jemma already knew: the only way to save the world was to split up. Jemma couldn’t fight her way past the swayed Inhumans between them and the warhead, but she _could_ distract that James fellow so May could get inside. And May let her, told her in no uncertain terms that she would _see her on Zephyr One_ and that’s the last time Jemma saw her.

It may well be the last time she ever sees her or any of her friends at all because approximately two seconds after enacting her brilliant distraction plan, she realized James had a purpose in coming to that particular section of the base and it wasn’t to protect the warhead; it was her.

“Let me _go_!” she demands. She’s been reduced to such pathetic escape attempts thanks to the duct tape James found in one of the offices on their way out of the base. In no time at all he had it wrapped tight around not just her wrists but her forearms and her calves. She squirms, trying without much effort to dislodge herself from his shoulder. Getting him to drop her would slow them down, but it won’t do her much good in her current state and it will almost certainly result in an injury given the uneven terrain.

“Calm down, sweetheart, no one’s gonna hurt you - probably.”

Fantastic. Daisy said Hive’s not much of a sharer, but it strikes Jemma as rather ominous that he’s kept the details of what he wants of her from his people. (She wonders whether anyone’s keeping Daisy apprised of the mission’s progress without her there to relay messages. She should’ve stayed to do it herself but there had been some worry Hive was producing more of his pathogen and if they could only see the _how_ she might have been able to figure how to undo it.

No such luck _and_ she’s been kidnapped. She is _absolutely_ taking that vacation with Fitz after this blows over.)

After a truly demeaning amount of time, the soft crunch of leaves beneath James’ feet becomes a hard pounding as they ascend into what she assumes is an aircraft. She squirms again, this time in earnest as she hopes to be able to roll out as they take off, but he’s too strong for her. He’s also a complete _wanker_ , as he slaps her arse to get her to quiet down.

“None of that now or I’ll burn your boots off.”

She kicks as best as she’s able and he only laughs. The sound echoes as they come into a narrow sort of passage and Jemma lifts her head to better see her surroundings in anticipation of an escape attempt. Her stomach promptly drops when she sees the containment unit brought specifically for Hive. He’s brought her aboard Zephyr One.

“’Ere she is,” he pronounces, setting her firmly on her feet and turning her to face the monitor room.

There are more of Radcliffe’s abominations scattered throughout and two at the controls in the cockpit, all wearing SHIELD uniforms. That sick feeling grows more intense as she recognizes Agent Fleisher’s necklace on one and that one in the corner can only be Agent Wissing, he’s the tallest they brought along, second only to Mack.

“Safe and sound,” James continues, “as requested.” And _that_ turns the pain into a knife.

She hadn’t noticed Hive, too horrified by what he’s done to her fellow agents to take note of the figure bent over the displays. He lifts his head slowly. His eyes look haunted, hollow, and she knows one brief moment of triumph - the memory machine must have done at least some damage - before he’s standing over her.

“What do you want with me?” she asks. Whether this is to be revenge for the damage she did him when last they met or simply some sick desire to watch her become one of his mindless slaves personally, she refuses to cower.

There are shadows under his eyes and he’s looking at her with an intensity that makes her heart pound even faster. She never knew Ward - not the _real_ Ward - well enough to read him and this pretender wearing his face is even more of a mystery. He lifts a hand to brush her cheek gently before gripping her shoulder hard enough she’s sure to bruise.

He turns, making to drag her along, and stops when she’s forced to clutch his sleeve to keep from tipping over.

“Sorry! Sorry,” James says. He drops to his knees and slides a knife quickly and carefully between her legs. He then has to tear away the duct tape before she’s actually able to move and it gives her time to notice the pain passing over Hive’s face.

“I’ll run down to the corner store,” he says softly.

Her grip on him tightens - not because she wants _him_ but because he’s currently her only support and her blood’s turned to ice. His eyes snap open and fix on her, but it’s not Will she sees in them this time.

His hand fists in the front of her shirt and he steps closer, bringing up his other hand to dig into her hair. “You’re going to tell me _everything_ I want to know,” he says, voice dripping a disturbing mix of rage and passion, “or I’ll carve it out of you.”

Those are Ward’s words, spoken to her between her own screams while tortured her, and hearing them again now - and from his own mouth - leaves her shaking. Hive’s arms wrap around her. She’s acutely aware of everything - the Zephyr transitioning from vertical lift to an actual flight path, the almost uninterested stares of the former agents, James standing and putting some distance between himself and the odd display - but nothing more so than the way Hive’s angry grip gentles and his head slides against hers in what can only be a nuzzling.

“My last sacrifice,” he sighs against her neck, the air hot and sticky like what they left behind on that island. He takes her hand and turns away without lifting his face again, forcing her to come with him back to the chair he left behind. “Your friends, as you no doubt know,” he says slowly, carefully, as though it’s as difficult to speak as it appears to be to walk, “have attacked me by bringing my past hosts’ memories to the front of my mind. It’s difficult to focus.” He drops into the chair and pulls her into his lap. His arms are like iron around her and his forehead like a brand where it lands against the side of her shoulder. “But two of my hosts know you, two of them think of you fondly, care for your well-being.”

While that might have been true of Will, it is just patently false in regards to Ward. But Jemma doesn’t think it very wise to argue with a creature who can be called mentally unstable at the _best_ of times, especially when he has her at his mercy.

“Sir,” Giyera says and Jemma does enjoy how fearful he looks, even if she’s feeling even worse. “Do you have any-” His eyes flick up to Jemma as if she might know. “Do you need anything else?” he amends.

“I need _this_ ,” he says savagely, his fingers digging into Jemma’s flesh until she squeaks in pain. His hold instantly gentles and his head rocks against her shoulder in what she assumes to be an apology. “My children know where to go next,” he says, his tone more measured. “Check on the warhead. Be certain SHIELD left no surprises.”

Jemma wouldn’t have thought it possible but she’s actually sorry to see Giyera leave. He and James disappear, both throwing worried glances over their shoulders, leaving her alone with Hive and his- his _children_. She can’t suppress her shudder of disgust and he pulls her deeper into his lap.

“You’re safe, Jemma,” he promises and she has the worrying feeling he believes it. “I protect what is mine.”

 


	10. sing-along

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt “I’ve got one word for you: sing-along!” from safelycapricious

“No,” Jemma says between chest compressions. “No way in hell you are leaving me _alone_ on an alien planet. You - are - going - to - survive.”

And isn’t that the worst of it? That she is saving _Grant Ward’s_ life.

Hopefully.

She bends over him and - ugh - opens his mouth to breathe into his lungs. (He had _better_ be grateful.)

His hand slips into her hair on the second breath and she can’t make space between them. Her hand spasms in the sand next to his head and his tongue slips into her mouth and it’s … good. Good enough she stops fighting.

“Your offering is highly acceptable,” he says when she comes up for air. It’s so utterly _not_ what she expected that she quirks her head in confusion and he does the same. “Hm,” he muses. “Interesting.”

She’s about to echo the word - because what does _that_ mean? - when something passes over his face. Literally. Something moves _beneath his skin_.

She scrambles back across the sand, putting a good ten feet of distance between them. “W-Ward,” she stutters, “I think there’s something wrong with you.”

He frowns at her. “Grant Ward is dead,” he says like it should be _obvious_ that the man who is speaking to her and sitting up and oh, standing, fantastic (she hurries to do the same) is _dead_. He looks her over carefully from head to toe and she tenses her muscles to keep from taking another step back when that thing moves beneath his skin again. “You are not a sacrifice,” he says and she thinks it might be a question.

“A sacrifice?” she asks carefully, hoping that doesn’t mean what she thinks it does.

His mouth quirks in a smile that is somehow _very_ Ward and very _not_ at the same time. “I had thought my worshipers sent you as a diversion. I see now I was wrong.”

She shakes her head. “I’m sorry. I-” she looks to the horizon and the twin moons rising up over the mountains. “I’ve had a very long day. Would you mind explaining … any of this?”

He grins Ward’s predatory grin and gestures to a stand of nearby stones. One is low enough to act as a bench, but she ignores it. She’ll remain standing so long as he will.

He shakes his head with an indulgent smile and explains. Ward _is_ dead. Hive, as he calls himself, needs host bodies - dead ones - in order to live, and some cult on Earth has been using the monolith to send living bodies to him for eons.

“And,” she asks carefully, “how long do these bodies last? Typically?” The question is half genuine curiosity - what does he _do_ to them that they can function after death? - and half worry because if they don’t last long, then things aren’t looking terribly good for her.

He steps closer and she finds that somehow, over the course of his explanation, he’s maneuvered her back against one of the stones. Perhaps she should have taken that seat after all. 

“Lovely as you are,” he says while tucking a loose bit of hair behind her ear, “I am male.”

“Does that make a difference?” she asks, curiosity winning out again. Is he incapable of taking a female host or-

He chuckles. It’s dark and sends a shiver through her that leaves her grateful for the stone at her back. “You are safe from me, Jemma,” he promises and perhaps she shouldn’t, but she believes him. He looks out across the sand, his expression sobering. “But I’m afraid that isn’t saying much. There’s no way back from this world.”

“There’s _always_ a way,” she says certainly. “If a door can open in one direction, it can open in the other.” Earth learned that the hard way when the Chitauri invaded. She pushes thoughts of _them_ away and focuses on Hive. “What can you tell me about your own trip through the monolith? What do you remember?”

“A great deal. I have the memories of all my past hosts, I know all they do of it.”

She grins. That will make things much easier. “Fantastic, then why don’t you tell me-” She cuts off as a growl sounds from her stomach. It’s been hours since she had breakfast at the Playground. “Oh,” she says sadly. “I don’t suppose you need to eat?”

“No. Though I enjoy it. I’m afraid there’s not much this world has to offer.” He nods over her shoulder. “There is a lake about three kilometers from here and beyond that is my home. Do you think you can make it?”

She smiles and turns to start off in the direction he’s indicated. “Are you kidding? We’re in a _desert_ and you’re promising _water_. I’ll walk as far as I have to.”

He falls into step beside her, subtly shifting her heading. “Tell me if you need to rest.”

She’s tired _now_ but she wasn’t kidding about the water. She was thirsty before leaving Earth; since she arrived here she’s been parched. But dwelling on that won’t make the journey any easier. She decides the best thing to do is to test Hive’s memory recall to pass the time.

“You know, there’s something we used to do - Ward and I and all the others - to make long road trips go by faster.”

He meets her stare with mild curiosity. He’s so _serene_ , nothing at all like the Ward she knew before or after the uprising. It makes it even harder to get a read on him.

When his silence stretches on, she figures either he can’t remember or he’s choosing not to. Or he’s being rude, but she doubts that given all the consideration he’s given her thus far. “I’ve got one word for you,” she says with a grin, “sing-along.”

He stops walking entirely and, after a pause, his eyes fall shut on a grin. “Oh, the _sing-alongs_ ,” he says like it’s his own fond memory that’s been brought to the fore. 

“Yes, the sing-alongs,” she says, setting to moving again. “Would you like to pick or should I?” 

She really thinks she’ll have to up until Ward’s clear voice starts singing out “500 Miles.” She’s so surprised she can only stare up until he pinches her on his way past. She joins in and they sing and laugh their way along to the promised lake. 

(If it’s strange that she’s singing and laughing with a corpse, it doesn’t occur to her until long after.)

 


	11. enough for one

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt "There's enough Kree blood for one..." from lillysbitchfest

He is alone. The others have either been killed - by the Kree or by SHIELD - or broken by Lash, altered so that he can no longer free them of their suffering. Even Radcliffe is gone, taken when SHIELD descended to rescue Daisy.

“We have to start over,” he says as he depresses the syringe’s plunger, emptying it of the deep blue liquid. It’s all that remains of Radcliffe’s side project now. The man thought Hive didn’t know he was still working with what he was able to gather of the Kree blood, always returning to it in between tests of Daisy’s offerings. He was never as certain as he claimed of the human-tainted samples and intended on using the pure formula on himself.

Now it will have a greater purpose.

“There’s only enough for one,” he says sadly as he watches it flow down the IV line. Before the last of it has even disappeared beneath the bandage, the chrysalis has begun to form. He smiles and brushes away sweat soaked hair from her forehead so that he can drop a kiss to what still shows of her skin. “You will make sure we don’t need more.”

Jemma is certainly the smartest woman two of his hosts have ever met and may be the smartest in all of his memories. She’s conquered alien biology before, she’ll do it again. This time for him.

She whines through the gag, her terror shrieking through his mind as the chrysalis closes over her completely. He’s familiar with her fear, had plenty of it on the planet and much preferred her later love for Will. It was warm and light and brighter than the sun she wished so desperately to see.

Even now the pieces of him carried on the formula are settling into her brain, ensuring that when she awakens, she’ll feel an even deeper joy. He’ll take away all her sorrow and pain over Will, erase the scars Grant left. He will make her new in every way.

He undoes the straps holding her in her seat - and none too soon, as the chrysalis falls away only a moment later. He expects many things - an explosion of power, a grateful smile, perhaps even an attack (Jemma has always been stronger than she appears, if anyone could fight through his influence, it would be her) - he does not expect nothing. 

But nothing is what he gets. Jemma’s eyes are peacefully shut and her body limp on the gurney. He waits, counts to ten, and still nothing.

The part of him that is Will Daniels quakes in fear.

“Jemma,” he says. He brushes her cheek with his knuckles and feels his heart tense in his own terror. She’s cold.

The facility he’s brought them to was once a HYDRA base but has long been abandoned. It still has the tools he needed - both to perform the procedure and to restrain her - but the power is limited. As such, the lights are dim and he hastily pulls the examination lamp back over them both so that he can better see her.

Fingers at her throat prove her heart still beats and he holds a scalpel before her mouth for long seconds until he sees fog. So she’s alive.

_Why does she sleep?_

He exerts some of his influence over her, pushing her with the microbes already inside her. It’s more than he had to do for the others - the bliss was enough - but it gains him nothing. 

He calls her name - Will’s voice, then Grant’s, voices from far history who had never heard English of any variety spoken - and still nothing.

Finally he shakes her. He is too forceful, knocking the gurney on its side in his frustration, and ends with them both on the floor, her head cradled in his lap.

She is his _last hope_. 

No. Not his last. There are other avenues he can pursue but this one _should have worked_.

He cards his fingers absently through her hair as he considers his next step. He will need to find someone new, someone better than Radcliffe. Perhaps a team would be best - bring together masters of many fields rather than expect one individual to know all that is necessary to change the world. He smiles down at her, inviting her to agree.

She remains as motionless as when she emerged from the mist. 

The stars are just visible through the dingy window, but they’re disappearing rapidly as the sun rises. Time is passing him by. If he leaves with enough of a fuss, SHIELD will find this place by noon. If he were to leave her, they would surely care for her until she wakes or until his new world has been realized and he may come for her himself.

His hand tightens reflexively on her shoulder. Will used to lay like this, head cushioned on her thighs while her accent gave new life to the books he’d read a hundred times already. It is one of his fondest memories.

He will do what he must to save this world, but he will not abandon Jemma to do it. She is one of his people now, and he will not cast her aside because she has become a burden. Perhaps, if he is very lucky, his team of experts will be able to awaken her as well.

He lays her gently on the floor, straightening her legs and cushioning her head on his folded coat before moving to gather the meager supplies he saved from his last base. He takes his time about it, in no hurry to begin again the work he expected to be finishing by now. 

When he returns for Jemma, he freezes in the door, at first fearful (hopeful) at finding he tile floor beneath the window empty. But when he comes around the downed gurney, he discovers her curled in its bend, fingers tight in fabric turned bright white by the sunlight streaming through the window.

“Jemma?” he asks, kneeling beside her. 

Her head turns slightly in his direction but her eyes remain shut.

He frowns, trying to make sense of this. It is possible Radcliffe’s formula only broke her where it should have elevated her, leaving her desperate for any comfort, even that so slight as a thin cushion to rest her cheek against. But if that’s the case, it’s also possible Radcliffe’s formula _succeeded_. The memory of her voice, coming to him for the first time across the sands of that barren hell, echoes through his mind again and he smiles.

“Here, sweetheart,” he says and crosses to the window. “It’s right here.”

His fist breaks easily through the glass, and Jemma’s head snaps up as light shines freely in. It falls golden over her and when, finally, she opens her eyes, they shine brighter than the sun she’s so desperate for.

It’s an auspicious start to the new race of Inhumans he seeks to create and, with her help, he’s certain it will be even more glorious than the Kree ever dreamed.

 


	12. this one's on me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Takes place during 3x18 The Singularity. For the prompt "this one's on me" for Will!Hive/Simmons

Jemma is just shifting closer to Fitz - close enough to take his hand in hers, close enough their knees will touch - when a waitress appears. She silently places a bottle of wine and two glasses on their table and Fitz shifts forward - away from Jemma - to call after her.

“We didn’t order this!”

An arm slides over Jemma’s shoulders and a warmth settles against her other side. “This one’s on me.” She stiffens immediately at the sound of the voice. Her head snaps around and she stares into Will’s eyes, made unfamiliar by the monster staring out from behind them.

Behind her, Fitz growls, “Let her-”

“You’re going to go with Daisy,” Hive says to him while his fingers curl around her shoulder tugging her closer to him and away from Fitz. “You’re free to argue, of course, but my friend at the bar has recently acquired some rather explosive powers and is dying to let them loose. In a crowd like this, all this alcohol…” He tips his head, barely giving any sign of sorrow at the potential loss of dozens of lives.

“Jemma,” Fitz says.

“Go,” she croaks. Hive smiles at her - that’s Will’s smile - and tears spring to her eyes. “I’ll be all right,” she says more clearly after a swallow. “If he was going to kill me, he’d have done it by now.”

“Very true,” he agrees magnanimously. 

She hears Fitz leave, hears Daisy’s empty reassurances that Jemma will be fine, that she’s _safe_ with the monster that killed Will, but she can’t tear her eyes from him to watch them go.

“What do you want?” she asks. 

His hand leaves her shoulder to begin toying with her hair. She has to close her eyes against the memory of Will playing with it in just the same way after their first night together, when she was lying on his chest, pretending to sleep and failing miserably at it.

“It all happened so fast - the portal opening, the storm,” he says sadly, “I never got to say goodbye.” For a moment, without the wrongness in his eyes to prove it to her, she can almost believe…

She forces her eyes open and it’s plain as day. His expression is sad enough, caring enough, but there’s something missing, some depth of emotion that was always in Will’s gaze when it fell on her. “You’re not Will,” she says firmly.

He doesn’t answer, only releases her - and she refuses to think about how cold she feels without him holding her - so that he can pour them each a glass of wine. She watches the sparkle of the dim lights on the liquid and feels _hate_ well up in her. It’s more than the hatred she feels for Ward, the one she’s carried in the well of her heart and carefully nurtured for two years. This isn’t cold and hard and calculated. This is an inferno burning her up from the inside, threatening to burst forth if she opens her mouth at the wrong moment. And so she keeps it firmly shut and watches in silence as he offers her a glass.

He looks a little amused when she won’t take it and sets his own aside so that he can wrap her hand around the stem for her. She gasps and catches his hand in her free one before he can pull away.

It isn’t stretching things to say that she knows Will’s hands intimately. She watched him work for months and knows the feel of them on every inch of her body. So when she speaks, it is with absolute certainty. “These aren’t Will’s hands.”

He smiles indulgently. “The body was damaged,” he says softly, like a lover speaking private words, “I restored it.” He slides his other hand into her hair and she is suddenly happy to feel its smoothness against her cheek. 

She nearly laughs and even leans into his touch just to revel in it. “You’re _not_ Will,” she says again, triumphant this time. She doesn’t feel a single callous or scar. There isn’t the slight curve in the littlest finger from a long ago accident. “You may have stolen his memories, but there isn’t a single bit of him left in that body.” She jerks away from his hold and throws her wine in his face.

She means to stand and run, but he’s faster than her. He catches her by the arm and pulls her back down so hard a jolt races up her spine. Making him angry was likely a very bad decision - at the least for the property value of this club, given the explosions and screaming that have begun - but at the sight of the pure fury on his face, an emotion Will never would have _dreamed_ of directing at her, Jemma can’t regret it one bit.

 


	13. not out loud

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A 3x21 "Absolution" AU.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt "things you said but not out loud" from thestarfishdancer

Coulson thinks Jemma’s going to meet Fitz, that she’s so relieved he’s made it safely out of the hangar she has to see him for herself, emergency protocols be damned. The truth is that she has to get out of the office before she keels over.

The pressure in her head is back, stronger than it was earlier. And, as she was barely able to function under the weight of it before, she is in some hurry now to make it to a remote storage closet where she’ll be able to collapse without alarming anyone.

Luckily, with the emergency lock down in effect, everyone is in too much of a rush to truly notice her, and she stumbles through the door without being stopped. It swings closed behind her, though she has no memory of pushing it shut, and she falls to the cold floor, unable to stand under the force bearing down on her.

Years ago, when Jemma was leaving for her first university tour, giddy with excitement to study and learn, she got a splinter in the bottom of her foot. It would have delayed the start of the tour to take the time necessary to work it out, so she simply put on a bandage, pulled on her socks, and got going. Over the course of the next few hours, whenever she thought it had worked its way loose on its own or, worse, whenever she forgot about it entirely, it would prick her again, a little deeper. By day’s end, she was struggling to hide a limp and hadn’t heard a word the tour guide said in the last hour.

 _That_ is how she’s felt for the last few weeks. Ever since Bucharest, there’s been a prickling at the corners of her thoughts. It crouches at the back of her mind like a shadow, occasionally even causes a tightness behind her eyes and, on rare occasions, forces horrific visions on her. When Fitz finally returned safely from the club, she hugged him tight and, over his shoulder, saw him lying dead on the hotel bed. It frightened her so badly she’s barely been able to look at him since.

But this - this weight on her - this is something new. It began with a stab of pain, akin to what she might have imagined an ice pick being jammed into one’s skull felt like, and ended just as abruptly some hours ago, retreating to a dull _something_. Like a headache buried beneath pain meds, it was still there and she was aware she could make it hurt again if only by focusing on it, but she dared not. And now it’s back in even greater force.

She doesn’t kid herself that she doesn’t know precisely why.

“Jemma.”

She drags her nails along the concrete floor and shuts her eyes so tightly it distracts from the pain.

“ _Jemma_ ,” It says again. “Come.”

“No,” she says, but she’s already pushing herself up. The pain is less, enough that she can move without fearing she’ll be sick. She clutches her knees, refusing to move farther. “I won’t let you make me into one of those things.”

There’s a chiding beneath the pain. It doesn’t see Radcliffe’s Primitives as abominations, he thinks they’re _beautiful_. 

She might be sick yet.

Outside, the alarm still blares and the footsteps rushing past are growing less frequent. This part of the base is being emptied, soon she’ll be alone. How long after that until she’s found and dragged into that mist? Five minutes? Ten?

She hugs her knees to her chest. However long she has left, she’ll cling to every second. She’s not going to willfully become one of It’s monsters.

“I have freed them from their suffering,” he says.

She drops her head back against the shelves, wondering if this is what it’s like for them. She could never quite get up the nerve to ask Daisy if she had been able to feel It the way she does. Asking would be admitting he’s burrowed his way into her head and she’s barely been able to admit it to herself.

“But I need you to ease mine,” he goes on.

She thinks a very rude suggestion for how he might go about relieving himself.

He chuckles, filling her head with the rumble of it. “You will not be harmed - or changed - of that you have my word.”

The word of the creature who killed Will, who’s wearing the face of Grant Ward. Yes, she’s sure that’s worth quite a lot.

“Can you discount it so easily? When you are not the only one in danger?”

Her heart seizes in her chest. The base is under lock down to prevent It or any of the gas from reaching the outside world. All he has to do will be to get in the ventilation and then he can transform everyone on base. He’ll have the beginnings of an army and all the equipment he needs to manufacture more of his formula. Not to mention the means to disperse it across the globe right there in the hangar.

She thinks of those engravings Talbot laughed over. Jemma’s never been religious, but she’s not about to trust the Devil to keep his word.

“Jemma.”

She starts at the voice, real and present with her. The door is open and It stands there. 

The pain lessens as he pulls her to him. She’s safe. She’s alive. “You will undo the damage SHIELD has done to me,” he says over the sound of his own thoughts.

“No,” she breathes softly. The pain may be gone, but with him so close the pressure is enough she can’t manage more.

He steps back, allowing her a view of the two Primitives hovering in the hall. “You will,” he says. And then to the others, “Bring her. Once she’s secure on the plane, flood the base.”

 


	14. with my lips on your neck

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another "Absolution" AU, in which Jemma accompanies the team sent to stop Hive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt "things you said with my lips on your neck."

“It is a commendable plan,” he says with a smile that makes fear curl in her gut. Or maybe it’s his words that do that.

He tips his head to one side in that predatory way of his and Jemma decides that no, it is most definitely the smile. The addition of ten thousand years’ worth of menace beneath Grant Ward’s already intimidating façade makes a great deal of difference. As does the weight on her mind. She can feel him like a shroud - or like sand. Like sand that always clung to her skin no matter how she tried to get clean. 

He steps closer, cupping her face between his palms. “Truly, I am impressed. The memory machine was an inspired weapon of attack.”

He trails off, his silent _but_ hanging in the air as his thumbs stroke her cheeks. Those ancient eyes grow distant, their expression more human. There’s a longing there, one she recognizes on a basic, primal level. 

Seeing her opening, she takes a minute step forward. It’s enough to snap him out of it. His hands still and his hold on her stiffens. His gaze returns to something superior and aloof.

“However,” he says as though he’d never stopped speaking at all, “you know as well as I do that I cannot be so easily contained. I was everywhere on the planet.”

She greatly doubts he was as omnipresent as that, but she was aware of the problem of keeping him in one place. All it would take is a moment’s thought and he could have half of himself away before the gel matrix prison had a chance to solidify or even _land_. And now that he’s read her mind and knows of the plan to entrap him, she’s going to have to find a way to keep all of him sufficiently occupied in one place.

“Do not fight me, Jemma,” he says sternly, the way he would to an unruly child. His hands fall away and he strides for the door the others have already escaped through. They'll be waiting outside. Elena with the beacon, May and Mack to provide cover. “The world I create will be better. There will be no loss, no heartbreak.” Bits of his skin are already floating away, exposing what cannot possibly be genuine muscle underneath. He’s ready to consume whoever he finds on the other side of the door and spares Jemma another smile before stepping out. “Unfortunately that world has not yet arrived.”

Her stomach turns at the unspoken promise that he’s about to kill  _her_ friends, break _her_ heart. She can’t let him.

The light slipping around the opening in the heavy door blinds her as she rushes after him. She catches the barest glimpse of May, of the beacon which will the containment unit held in Elena's hand, but then Jemma catches Hive’s arm and she uses it to swing herself around into his chest. She quite literally thumps against him and the world goes silent and still around them when her eyes catch his. Or the world seems to have frozen, at any rate; his parasites have stopped in midair, creating a sort of veil hiding the surrounding forest from her view. There’s a sting on her arms where a few caught her before she surprised him into stopping; she ignores it and the angry red marks she sees when she lifts her hands.

“It will not work,” he says. He’s stiff - and absurdly tall. Why did he have to go and choose _Ward_? Why not a man of reasonable stature? As he won’t come to her, she goes up on her toes to press her lips from his chin down along the line of his jaw to the tender skin of his neck. “You will not hold me. I will not be imprisoned again, Jemma.”

But she thinks he’s wrong because the veil has gone and his hands are on her hips. When she nips at his skin with her teeth he growls and maneuvers her into a proper kiss. His arms are like steel around her back and she shouldn’t enjoy it but she does. He’s strong and sturdy and it reminds her of happiness in a world without hope.

He growls again, growing more demanding, more _him_. It’s enough to remind her why she’s doing this and she lifts a hand to gesture to the others. There’s a moment of hesitation, long enough that she must wrap her arms around his shoulders properly again or remind him there’s more to this moment than the two of them. 

She doesn’t fault Elena her reluctance. As there’s no safe way to contain Hive outside of the gel matrix, they won’t be able to release him from it, even briefly.  Which means there will be no safe way to release her.

If it means stopping the monster that she brought back to Earth, she thinks she might be okay with that.

“We will be free,” he promises as the prison descends on them, but he gives her no time to deny him, not even enough to take in another breath before the gel traps them. His lips cover hers again and this time when everything goes silent, it is them that have frozen while outside the world continues on.

 


	15. cute

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For a first sentence prompt from safelycapricious.

It shouldn’t have been cute - but it was. And so Jemma - as Daisy put it - kidnapped it.

“It could have a creepy tentacle monster family! You might’ve stolen their _baby_!”

Jemma only smiled patiently at the aquarium Mack had installed in the lab after her survey team’s return. The alien’s bioluminescence - a result, she was sure, of the planet’s lack of direct sunlight - flickered off and on in patterns as it moved. “I’m sure it’s fine,” she said and the lights returned to their steady glow. It was a sign of what she’d suspected for some time: the creature could hear them through the glass and was reacting to the sounds of their voices. 

Daisy’s distress had in turn caused it distress, but Jemma’s sedate tone soothed its nerves. A fact born up when the creature met her at the glass, pressing its mess of tentacles to the surface. She rested her fingers on her own side and smiled when the bioluminescence intensified.

“Weird,” Daisy said. “ _Very_ weird.”

“It’s remarkable.” Jemma bent closer, awestruck as she always was watching the creature. 

“Yeah.” Daisy’s dull response was a touch too slow and a touch too long. Jemma turned, concerned. “You’ve been spending a lot of time with it,” Daisy said. “Like, a _lot_.”

“It’s a new life form!”

“That you brought back from an _alien planet_. I can name like 20 movies off the top of my head about why that’s a bad idea." She hesitates briefly. "And now you’re always in here.”

“I’ve always _always_ been in the lab,” Jemma snapped. It wasn’t as though it was new or strange behavior, not worth aggravating the creature over. She rested a hand against the glass as the creature spun angrily in the water, hoping to calm it.

“See? That? _That’s_ weird. It’s like you’re communicating with it.”

“Why is that strange? Humans communicate with lower life forms all the time. We train dogs and horses. Zookeepers communicate with their animals. It’s perfectly normal.”

“Yeah, but how do you know this thing isn’t communicating _back_?”

Jemma shook her head. “That’s preposterous.”

Only it wasn’t. She’d been wondering lately whether the creature’s responses to outside stimuli weren’t indications of a greater intelligence. Perhaps what she’d found on that alien world wasn’t just some lower life form fresh from the primordial ooze. Perhaps, intellectually, it was as advanced as any human.

The possibility was thrilling.

“Can you just back off a little?” Daisy asked. “Be a little bit careful? I don’t want you to be the super hot girl who dies ten minutes into the horror movie.”

Jemma smiled - both at the compliment and the concern. “I assure you, I’ll take every precaution with our guest.”

Daisy’s relief wavered briefly, but the subject was dropped and Jemma permitted to return to her study of the other samples taken on their brief foray through the monolith. 

And in the days that followed she made every effort to keep her promise - truly. She kept a respectful distance from the tank and refrained from speaking to the creature as though it were a person - at least whenever there was anyone else in the lab to hear her - for three solid weeks. It all went perfectly well. 

Until the day Grant bloody Ward invaded their base with his nasty HYDRA soldiers. 

She was away from the labs during the initial attack and when she finally made it back there - in search of both weapons and fellow survivors - horror stopped her in her tracks. 

“Oh, Simmons,” Bobbi sighed, seeing the shattered and empty aquarium. “I’m so sorry.” Her hand was warm on Jemma’s shoulder. “We’ll make ‘em pay, huh? Grab me a few more ICER magazines from the back there and I’ll see what Fitz’s been working on.”

Jemma could only nod and do as she was told. Crossing the lab felt like walking through that desert sand in her space suit, but she had no idea why. It wasn’t as though this was the first lab subject she’d lost; why then did it hurt so much? Like she’d lost a friend?

She’d avoided the scene directly in front of the aquarium on her way across the lab, not wanting to see what HYDRA had made of her creature, but as she gathered the requested supplies, along with several dendrotoxin grenades salvaged from the days when Centipede was their greatest worry, she heard a wet, sloshing noise. 

Heart in her throat, she rounded the row of lab benches the aquarium sat amidst and found a man. He stood slowly, gingerly, coming up bit by bit so that she saw the blood dripping down his tac vest and the ragged mess of his neck before she saw-

“Ward?” she gasped, rounds and grenades slipping from suddenly numb fingers. There was no way, with an injury like that, that he could be-

But he wasn’t. His eyes fixed on hers and she would've known, even without the sight of that same bioluminescence curling away like a tentacle beneath his temple, that it wasn’t Ward at all. 

He tipped his head, smiled, and opened his mouth. Blood trickled out over his teeth and she could see the insides of his throat trying to work. He frowned and pressed two fingers into the hole.

“Jemma,” he says, the word coming out stilted, syllable by syllable. He stepped closer, smiling. “It is nice to finally meet you properly.”

She smiled back and lifted her fingers to touch the spot she’d seen the bioluminescence shining through. “I could say the same.”

 


	16. touch me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's not Will who finds Jemma on Maveth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt "you only ever touch me in the dark" from an anon.

His lips are on her neck and his hands are under her shirt and it all feels _so good_. And good is a rare luxury on this world, so she hates to do this but she really has no choice.

“Stop,” she says, moving her hand to his shoulder. “ _Stop_ ,” she says again, as much for her own benefit as his. She wants him to stay, wants him to keep doing what he’s doing, but she can’t let him.

He stops and, though she can’t see him in the dark of the cave, she can feel him hovering, frozen only a few inches away. “What?” he pants, his voice tight with fear.

She hesitates, unsure how to say what she means to. “You only ever touch me in the dark.”

She couldn’t exactly help but notice. Outside the mountain caves they use for shelter, the planet’s in perpetual twilight and completely deserted. They’re the only two people in the whole world. He could kiss her and hold her anywhere at all - and she’s seen him staring, seen his fingers curling with desire before he catches himself - but he always does. He always stops and waits until they’re here, in the dark.

She reaches for him, having grown adept at navigating without sight in the last few months. Her hand finds his cheek and he leans into her touch. “What are you afraid of?” she asks.

He hesitates, and she wishes she could see his expression. She would wish she hadn’t asked at all, but it needed to be done. They’ve only got each other here, they won’t survive without honesty.

“You have had to endure much,” he says carefully, “since coming here.”

She shifts forward, closer to him and breathes out a laugh. “And you haven’t?” He’s been here longer than her. He won’t say how long, but she gets the idea, from his expression when she named the year, that it’s been a while.

He brushes down her hair with both his hands and moves forward to kiss her forehead. “I don’t want to lose you,” he says against her skin.

“You won’t,” she says, wrapping an arm around his waist. “I wasn’t exactly living a typical nine-to-five life before coming here. There’s not much you can say to shock me.”

His chest rumbles against hers. “This will.”

She smiles and presses her cheek to his so he can feel it. “Oh good. Something novel.”

His hands move to her back and she gets the idea he’s holding her to keep her from running. “I’m not … what you imagine.”

She tries, she really does, but the way he says it sends a trickle of anxiety through her. “What do you mean?”

“I was. Long ago. But then I was changed. An alien race called the Kree altered my DNA.”

She’s heard this story. “You’re an Inhuman?” But no, that doesn’t make any sense. The Kree stopped experimenting on humans millennia ago.

“They banished me here when they saw I had become too powerful to be controlled.”

She catches his face in her hands again, feeling the features she knows so well. If she expects eons’ worth of wrinkles to have sprung into existence in the last few minutes, she finds no evidence of it. But that … that’s silly. Impossible. He can’t be.

“How- how long have you been here?” she asks.

She feels his smile against her palm. “We did not number the years as you do when I left Earth.”

Oh. There’s an ache settling in her chest.

“But you look-”

“This body … It was not always mine. From time to time people have found their way through the monolith, as you did. When they die, I salvage what is left.”

Since arriving on this planet, Jemma hasn’t felt truly cold. Not once. She does now. 

“Is that why I’m here?” she asks, lifting her chin proudly. She’s faced death before. That she’s doing it now on an alien planet in her lover’s arms won’t make her cower.

“ _No_ ,” he says, pulling her closer. “No, Jemma. You’re here because-” his head bows- “when I am loving you, I forget myself. Or, to be more precise, I remember myself. When I do, this body changes, becoming something you would find horrific.”

She drags in a breath, trying to focus as fear threatens to distract her from reason. “Do you kill them? The people whose bodies you … salvage?”

“Sometimes,” he says heavily. “Sometimes I must.”

“So you can take their bodies?”

“No. There’s no need for that. Everyone dies eventually. Except me.”

She’s heard him talk like this before, but she’s never known the depth of his hurt. His hands reluctantly drop away as she shifts back and she catches one before it can fall out of her reach. “Come on.”

“What?” He doesn’t move, forcing her to stumble back.

“We won’t know how I feel about the real you until you let me see.” She gives him a tug. “Come on.”

He comes out into the light with her. 

She was wrong. He does surprise her - again. But she isn’t horrified, not at all.

 


	17. primrose

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A very, very AU MCU history.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt "primrose" for the soulmates meme.

“They’ll come … won’t they?”

Culver, the leader of their unit, is the one to shake his head. “SHIELD won’t break the treaty.”

“But _someone_ will come?” Santoro presses.

“No,” Jemma says, softly so that Draves won’t hear her over her muted sobs. She lost her last team just this way. Two men crossed the border in an attempt to stop a tragedy. They succeeded, but no extraction was possible. 

She wonders if it was like this for them. Did they spend hours huddled together on the dirt floor of a temple? Did they cry, knowing they would never return home? Did they comfort one another?

She hopes their ends came quicker.

All at once a shudder goes through their guards, putting them instantly on alert. Up to now, the Inhumans holding them haven’t seem like guards at all. The team isn’t being watched, and the Inhumans stand about so casually that Jemma almost imagined she could walk out the door without encountering any resistance.

Culver and Santoro have both noticed the shift. Culver gives her a nod, a silent order to be ready for whatever happens. Jemma gently touches Draves’ shoulder. The younger woman stops her crying, instantly ready to go to work. Jemma smiles and only hopes she can be so brave.

Almost as one, the Inhumans look to the door. A moment later a figure darkens it and a tremor of primal fear goes through Jemma, like the first time she faced death. The memory is a mistake. As the figure steps into view she has to blink several times, certain she’s hallucinating, superimposing the face of the man who saved her _then_  on the man who is here _now_.

“Ward?” she manages weakly.

It both looks like Ward and doesn’t. She’s never seen him smile as easily as he does now. Small as the curve of his lips is, there are strangers in this room and the Ward she knew could barely smile around his teammates. He’s dressed differently as well, and while Inhuman fashions are not their fashions, the coat he wears is so unlike him…

He holds himself differently too, she realizes as he comes nearer. He was always controlled, always with that slight air of menace, but now there’s something heavier there. Before, he walked into a room, sized everyone up, and proceeded differently depending on how many of the people he was capable of besting if it came to a physical fight. Now it’s as though he doesn’t need to pause, he already knows he can kill them all.

Which is a terribly odd thought to have when faced with one’s friend, thought to be long since dead. Guilt rises up in her, but it can’t overwhelm the fear.

“Ward?” she asks again when he drops to one knee before her.

His eyes are on her face - they haven’t left it since she said his name - and remain there when he reaches for her side. Her weapons have, naturally, been removed, but it’s her shirt he’s aiming for. She twists away when he tries to pull at it. There was a time when he was allowed - but never like this, never in the presence of others. His head tips to one side, his expression chiding.

“Let me see, Jemma.”

She stills and drops her arms, allowing him to lift her shirt. “What happened to you?” she asks softly, shooting a look to the guards. They’re all watching, something hungry in their eyes. “Ward, did they hurt you?” The end of the question comes out strangled. 

In the brief months they worked together, Jemma treated no small number of Ward’s injuries. She likely knows his battle scars better than he does. The scar on his neck, precisely two inches beneath his ear, the one that would have killed him had the blade swung only a little farther to the right, is gone.

His fingers - colder than she’s ever felt them - brush her skin when he pulls at her jeans. She gives a small sound of fear, shocked by the chill as much as by the change in his focus. Culver moves, to defend her no doubt, and then all at once he’s against the wall, held there by nothing more than the will of the Inhuman nearest the door.

Ward - or the Inhuman masquerading as Ward, as Jemma is beginning to think is the case - throws Culver only a brief look before tugging again at the waist of Jemma’s jeans.

Her soulmark is stark black against the pale skin of her belly. One of his fingers uncurls from the fabric to just barely brush the outer edge of one of the lines. Soulmarks are, by their very nature, almost random in design, much like fingerprints. It’s rare to have one of recognizable shape and Jemma’s mother always took to calling her odd combination of waving lines around a central core her “primrose.” Jemma herself never thought it so uniform as that, but at thirteen she appreciated the attempt at turning the chaotic mess into something lovely.

She wonders what the impostor is seeing in it now.

He lifts his face, smiling more broadly than she ever knew Ward capable of. When he stands, he takes her with him, and holds her hand in an iron grip as he heads for the door.

“Wait,” she says, twisting to look back at the others. Draves is on her feet, attempting to fight past two of the Inhumans, and Santoro is gaping. Culver is worryingly still. “My team!” 

The impostor only pulls her onward, his hand cold as ice in hers.

 


	18. snow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> No Jemma or Hive here, but Skye and Jiaying talk about them a lot.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt "snow" for the soulmates meme.

The SHIELD agents have gone. Finally they have been left in peace. Or, as near to it as is possible, when thousands of tons of snow are sliding down the side of one of the nearby mountains. 

The avalanche is far from endangering the settlement, however there may be some unexpected flooding of the lower fields in a few weeks. Jiaying makes a note to speak to Mara about diverting the water away from the crops, but sets the matter aside as she nears the cliff’s edge and her purpose in leaving Afterlife’s walls so soon after they’ve been cleansed.

The SHIELD agents have gone - but Daisy remains.

She stops her violent attack on the mountain, however Jiaying does not kid herself that the anger which caused it has been satisfied. Daisy’s hands fist at her sides and her jaw remains tense. Her eyes are harder than Jiaying has ever seen them, even when she first found Raina among them.

“Skye-”

“Is she alive?” Daisy interrupts, eyes still on the mountain.

Jiaying sighs. “Yes. She is alive. Cal promised he would not harm her unnecessarily.”

“ _Unnecessarily?_ ” 

It tears at her heart that _this_ is what has Daisy finally facing her, but she holds her ground. She’s faced the fury of Inhumans far more powerful and will not be intimidated by her own daughter. 

“What reason could he _possibly_ have to hurt Simmons?” Daisy demands. “What reason could _you_ have for kidnapping her in the first place?”

Jiaying takes a measured breath, hoping Daisy will follow suit and calm some. “We didn’t take her for her own sake, if it’s any consolation.”

Daisy blinks, looking suddenly young and small. For all that Jiaying wishes she could have Daisy’s childhood back, she does not care to see her looking this way now. “So you really did plan this,” Daisy says softly, turning again to the mountain.

Jiaying steps closer. “Yes. I’m afraid so.” She rests a hand on her shoulder and is relieved when it isn’t shrugged off immediately. “I didn’t want to force you to choose. And,” she admits, “selfishly I didn’t want to see you choose them over us.” Daisy’s hatred can be endured. For the sake of her daughter’s life and freedom - and that of all their people - Jiaying is willing to endure a great many things.

“So instead you used me. You let me convince Coulson to have the peace talks and convince Simmons it was safe to come.”

“If Coulson is half the man you say, he had to have known the talks were in his best interest, I doubt he took much convincing. And Simmons is a loyal SHIELD agent, she wouldn’t refuse a direct order.” 

Daisy rounds on her and Jiaying’s hand drops from the force of her momentum. “I told my _best friend_ that she’d be _safe_ and the whole time you were planning on _kidnapping her_.”

There are excuses that can be made, appeals to Daisy’s growing sense of loyalty to her people here, but Jiaying thinks, with the wound still so raw, the only balm that will ease the pain is the truth.

“When the Kree made the first Inhumans,” she says slowly, “they were not fools. They understood that a living weapon is dangerous, unpredictable, and would, from time to time, need to be reigned in. To that end, they gave one of their new creations the ability to control the others.”

“You mean he could neutralize powers?” Daisy asks.

“No. He was able to control their _minds_. The impression our records of that time give is that he brainwashed them, molded their will to match his. He was hailed as a god, even while the Kree still walked the Earth, and when he grew too power-hungry, they banished him to the farthest stars.” She takes another breath, wishing with all her heart what she’s about to say weren’t true. “Two months ago, HYDRA succeeded in bringing him back to Earth.”

“HYDRA?”

Jiaying nods while hoping Daisy's soft tone is a good sign. “They have worshiped him all this time, hoping he would return and grant them dominion over the Earth.”

“So why not tell that to Coulson? SHIELD can help you fight HYDRA!”

“But not ourselves. What can we do against an enemy who will enslave us, body and soul? SHIELD will have to know their most prudent course of action would be to cage us so that we cannot be used against them or anyone else.”

Daisy shakes her head. She doesn’t believe the danger this ancient Inhuman poses, she didn’t see the way a single touch turned Alicia into an adoring sycophant. Or perhaps she only refuses to believe SHIELD would be so callous. 

“So you took Simmons because you think that’ll stop SHIELD from coming after us?”

Us. Jiaying allows the word to sink into her heart for one brief moment. “Do you remember the day I found you drawing patterns in the sand with your powers?”

Daisy shakes her head, but her expression makes it clear it is more to do with the sudden change in topic than a lapse in memory. 

“You told me you were making your friends’ soulmarks and I asked you about one; you said it belonged to Simmons.”

“Yeah. So?”

Jiaying smiles sadly. “You and I don’t have soulmarks, it’s the tradeoff of our heritage. But the first Inhumans did and, in fear of a time such as this, our ancestors passed down an image of that Inhuman’s, in hopes it could be used against him.”

Daisy stares, searching her face. “No. No. You’re crazy! There’s no way Simmons’ soulmate is some _monster_ from the dawn of time!”

Jiaying only stands in silence. If Daisy doesn’t believe, there’s nothing she can say that will convince her otherwise.

“So Cal’s just going to hold her? Forever?”

“Or until we can find a way to kill the early Inhuman, yes. Cal’s the only one who can protect her and all of us. He’s not an Inhuman so he can’t be controlled the way we can and-”

“And he’s a psycho,” Daisy supplies, her voice like the banging of a gavel, “so he’ll be only too happy to cut her into little pieces if this guy does take us all over.”

“ _Skye_ ,” Jiaying says, gently chiding. “You know your father would never want to hurt one of your friends.”

She laughs dryly. “No, see, I know for a fact that he would. Because he _did_. Twice. And now you gave him another one.” She makes to walk past. 

“Skye,” Jiaying says again, reaching for her.

Daisy angles away, pinning her with a withering look. “Don’t. Just don’t. I can’t see you right now.”

Jiaying watches her go and then turns to the mountain, laid bare of its snow. Some of that snow has likely sat there for a thousand winters, protecting the heart of the mountain. But the mountain will go on standing without it. It will endure. It must.

 


	19. more ficlets (Hive's POV)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More drabbles too short to warrant their own chapter.

 

 **prompt:** one falling asleep with their head in the other's lap

 

“My lord?”

Hive’s eyes, already unfocused as he views the widespread destruction humanity continues to wreak upon itself, slip shut. Gideon. Must he return so soon? He was only here just … (he searches his memory, marks the time in the lower right of one of the screens) two days ago? That long?

Time passes much quicker when he has more than shifting sands to occupy his thoughts, that is certain.

“I had hoped,” Gideon goes on, having decided he will pretend he’s been invited to continue rather than wait for permission, “that you would be more … recovered before we brought this to your attention, but it’s presenting something of a problem and we’d rather not- er, move forward, shall we say, without your input.”

This body is broken, left damaged by Coulson (and that is a barb as irksome as Gideon’s face, old and worn and _alive_ ); it takes some effort to lift the head, untwist the spine. Slowly, ever so slowly, he drags his attention from the screens to the figures hovering at his bedside.

“I thought perhaps you’d like to have her back,” Gideon says with an oily smile so like his father’s. But Hive barely sees it before his attention fixes firmly on the woman held behind him.

A days’ old bruise blooms on her cheek and in addition to hands bound behind her back, she is held by not one but two guards. The part of him that is Will roars in fury. The part of him that is Grant grins with pride.

For his part, Hive speaks. “ _Jemma_ ,” he sighs, the word coming up thin from his collapsed lungs, and reaches for her.

Gideon nods to the guards and Jemma’s hands are freed. It takes a shove to move her forward and then Gideon’s hand (and Hive doesn’t like that any more than Will does) to force her to the bed.

“Don’t-” she snaps when he makes to catch her hand, but the rest is caught in a gasp at the contact. This body is cold as ice. 

He uses that unfortunate side-effect to ease her pains. She stands determinedly, knees digging into the edge of the mattress while he wraps his hands around first one of her raw wrists and then the other. Her eyes are screwed shut and her lips are a thin line. 

He tugs gently, steadily. Finally gravity wins him the fight and she falls. She scrambles as soon as she hits the mattress, attempting to stand again, but he catches her hip, desire lending him speed. She sits stiffly and watches him, waiting to see what he will do. He’s curious too.

“Are you pleased?” Gideon asks. He’s still here.

Hive tamps down his annoyance. Speaking is difficult as he is now and he will choose his words with care. As such, he sees no reason to verbalize an answer when actions will speak just as well for him.

He uses his hold on Jemma to slide forward and rest his head on her thigh. She is warm and the frantic beating of her heart is a drum at his ear. He turns his eyes back to the screens, but pays them only cursory mind. The devastation they depict is dull, repetitive. But Jemma he has not seen in months. She was stolen away from him by _Fitz_. (Another barb which will be dealt with.) He drinks her in - her warmth, her scent, the shaking she cannot hope to hide at such close proximity no matter how she tries - and lets everything else fade away.

 

 

 **prompt:**  tense

 

Hive does not require sleep as the mortals do. He is eternal and has no need to allow his body to sit dormant that it may rest and recover from the day’s hardships; however, with so many voices in his head, dreams are of great use to him, allowing his subconscious to sift through the refuse of the day’s thoughts. He simply sits back, breathes deep, shuts his eyes to the world, and allows his mind to drift away wherever it will.

No sooner has he done so than strong but delicate hands slide over his shoulders. “You seem tense.”

He hums an agreement - he will agree to anything at all so long as she continues that marvelous pressure. His muscles ease from her attentions and her warmth both. He leans back into her and tips his head against her stomach. She smiles down at him.

“Hard day conquering the world?”

“Bringing _peace_ to the world,” he corrects.

“Tomato, tomahto,” she says, tipping her head to either side on each word. Her hair is loose and, watching it fall over her shoulders, he wants nothing more than to run his fingers through it.

“Come here,” he orders.

She gives a teasing smile as though she would like to argue simply for argument’s sake, but bends. He reaches up, intent on her lips.

“My lord?”

He opens his eyes, the dream broken. “Yes?” he asks, and hopes his annoyed tone may be blamed on the current state of his lungs.

“We’ve brought the books,” Gideon says. Though he would never prostrate himself, his fear is always potent enough to sour the air when he stands in Hive’s presence. “Is there anything else you might require?”

Considering the question, Hive allows his head to tip back. “Yes,” he says, imagining a smiling face above him, “there is one thing more I shall need.”

 

 

 **prompt:** whimper

 

Her hand wraps tightly enough around his that she would be breaking bones if he were only human. The sound escaping her is small and high and makes his blood pound in his ears.

“Where is he?” he demands, pressing his free hand more firmly to her side. Blood oozes between his fingers. Her head tips back against the tile floor and she lets out a cry that ends too soon, cut off by her own pain. His parasites will only consume her, furthering the damage. He is helpless to repair her. 

“The doctor’s on his way,” Giyera says. “There have been several injuries on base, but as soon as he heard it was you who needed him-”

“Not him,” Hive says. He pulls himself closer to her. His knees press against her ribs and he can feel her heart beating so clearly it might as well be his own. 

Giyera’s fear is cold against the burn of Jemma’s pain.

“He’s being held in one of the conference rooms. It was the nearest room we could secure, and we assumed-”

“That I would want him close. Yes, I do.” 

The doctor bursts through the door along with three assistants. They hurriedly take up the cause of holding Jemma together, and he allows them to do so, hesitating only to press a kiss to her forehead. She clings to his hand when he pulls free, and though he knows she cries for what’s being done to heal her, he imagines it might be for loss of him.

“You will be fine,” he half-promises her and half-orders the medical team. Her own blood stains her face and hair where he stroked her cheek; the sight of it incites a level of rage that brings to mind Grant Ward’s exposure to the berserker staff. He stands and faces Giyera. “Take me to him.”

It will be some time before he can be given news of her and he will pass it tearing apart the man who dared threaten what is his.

 

 

 **prompt:**  it's never too late

 

“Will is dead,” she says, and before he can respond three sudden jolts strike his abdomen, tearing through his flesh. 

The damage is minimal; even Will, who managed a bullet straight to his head on the planet, couldn’t do enough to truly harm him, and the man he so recently devoured in order to get a little privacy with Jemma is already healing the wounds. But none of that means it doesn’t _hurt_.

She makes to run, but the shock of the gunfire dropped his hand to her shoulder and he’s using her to keep steady.

“Yes,” he agrees through his teeth. 

She lets out a pathetic sort of gasp when he wrenches the gun from her hands to toss it aside. From the sound, he imagines it lands amidst the bones he left in front of the elevator. 

She strikes him. Her palm hits his cheek with enough force to turn his head. When she tries again, he catches her hand and puts it to a more useful task: namely, pressing against the wounds she inflicted.

She gasps again, this time in some mix of horror and disgust as blood - or whatever he has in its stead, even he has never been quite sure - oozes between their fingers. He holds her hand in place and steps closer as he straightens.

“Will is dead,” he agrees, sliding his fingers into her hair to knead the back of her neck the way Will so loved to do. “As is Grant Ward. But I carry them both within me. They live on _through me_.” He thinks he’s made that more than clear by now.

She drops her eyes to his chest, refusing to look at him while she shakes her head in vehement denial. “No. You’re just- just some pretender, some _con artist_ , you’re not-”

He tightens his hold, forcing her head back so that she must face him. “Jemma.”

There’s fear and desperation both in her eyes. She looked like this when he first saw her. She was weak from days without water and long miles walked across unforgiving desert sands, but she would not be beaten. 

He runs his thumb over her cheek. “I envied him.” While he was still trying to puzzle out why he had been sent a woman when his followers know he prefers male hosts, Will appeared and stole her away, locked her in those caves to keep her from his influence. “You should have been mine.”

Close as they are, he can feel the shudder that rolls through her. 

“I would _never_ have-” she begins, but his smile stops her cold. 

He’s well healed now and he moves his hand to cup her face. She forgets to drop her hand from him.

“I see now that destiny was more elegant than I imagined,” he says. “You weren’t only sent _to_ me, you were sent to bring me _home_.”

She tries to shake her head again in denial, but he holds her fast.

“I had begun to despair of ever returning, but you gave me hope.” She flinches at the word, and he only goes on smiling. Will’s hope, Hive’s hope, it’s all the same now. “You reminded me it’s never too late. And for that, you shall be rewarded.”

She draws in a breath to, no doubt, deny his reasoning. He silences her with the kiss he’s craved for long months. Will’s memories of those they shared were more a taunt than a relief, adding fuel to the fire of his longing - and the added lightyears between them did ample damage of their own. He pours all of that frustration into her until she stops pushing him away and starts clinging to his shoulders.

It is more satisfying than he ever dared to dream.

 

 

 **prompt:**  things you said when you kissed me goodnight

 

He’s trapped. He can feel this body dying around him but he can’t leave it, can’t separate himself from what was Will Daniels.

SHIELD did this to him. First they sought to tear his mind apart with the memory machine, then they used the distraction of it to do … this. Whatever this is. He only knows this body is dying and soon he will die with it.

On Earth.

He doesn’t know whether the thought comes from his own mind or Will’s or one of the thousands who came before, but it’s comforting all the same. To die on Earth, the world that birthed him, that saw him made new, that he would have saved from its own hubris.

There are worse places to end; he has seen them.

But still, he would rather not die here, in this prison. The uniform white of the walls reminds him of the never-ending blue of Maveth. He would have color, beauty in his last moments.

And while he is wishing for things he will not have, he would like to not be alone. He was alone for so long, and Will’s fears are clawing up his throat as breathing becomes more difficult.

The door opens, and like an angel - better than an angel for she would never do to him what the Kree did - Jemma appears. She is all warm color and she is _here_ , with him. He smiles, allowing himself the fanciful thought that perhaps she knew of his distress.

She comes closer, so that he cannot see her fully and, as he cannot bear to roll onto his back, must be satisfied with her shoes and calves.

“Jemma!” a voice calls. Fitz. 

Hate rises within him. There are very few people he would have as witness to his passing, and Fitz is not one of them. In fact, now that he considers it, there is only one person still living he would have with him now.

“I’m fine, Fitz,” she says. She kneels, and though her tugging at him hurts, it’s a small price to pay for the warmth of her. She pulls his head into her lap while Fitz yells, growing ever more frantic as he fears she will be consumed. The sound of his voice is beginning to ache. “Go away, Fitz,” she snaps, and the beseeching stops.

Her fingers card through his hair, and she smiles that smile that made Will think of the sun. If he cannot have sunlight now, this is a welcome substitute.

“I hate you,” she says, but her voice is as gentle as her hands. “I hate you _so much_ for taking him from me.”

There is a defense in his throat, a reminder that he also, in his own way, brought Will back to her. He swallows it down and says only, “I know.”

Something shifts in her expression as tears well in her eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have left-”

He wants to lift his hand to touch her face, her hair, but he can only reach so far as her wrist. Her skin is almost burning against the ice in his skin.

“I couldn’t let you die alone again,” she says as the tears finally break free.

He knows her words are not for him, but with his mind still scattered from the memory machine and the life draining from him, it is easy to pretend that there is one person in all the world who cares that he will soon be gone, one person who loves him.

She bends over him to kiss his forehead. There was a time he would have died for such affection, and he feels his hurts ease as surrender comes over him.

“I love you,” he breathes. Because Will would say it. Because he wants to mean it.

Jemma’s tears land on his cheeks, and his eyes shut on her face. It isn’t so bad an end.

 


	20. ficlets (Jemma)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And more especially short drabbles.

 

 **prompt:** cold

 

Strong hands lift Jemma from the floor. She’s so cold - from hours spent unmoving on the hard stone and her body’s attempts to heal itself - that she winces at the heat in them. 

She forces her aching eyes open and nearly sobs in relief. “Ward?” she croaks.

She doesn’t know why or how he’s come to be here and she doesn’t much care. He’s here now and it can only be a matter of time before he kills her. If she weren’t already on the floor, the relief would see her dropping.

He regards her with an odd sort of distance, but she supposes it might not be so odd. The Ward she knew was a lie and she knows from experience the real Ward doesn’t care one whit about her. Still, it’s strange to have someone she once thought of as a friend looking her over like she’s one of her own test subjects.

One of those burning hands of his brushes her hair down and she leans into it, shivering as she feels the chill in her cheek. He pulls away far too soon, his attention drifting to his hand between them instead of her. Her heart seizes in her chest when she sees what’s so interesting. His fingers are frosted over, his nails turned blue.

“A success,” he says. Her heart resumes its beating, going double-time now. She may not have known the real Grant Ward the way she knew the impostor living on the Bus, but she knows enough to recognize that, despite appearances, this isn’t him. That voice and those eyes … there’s something superior in them, something she’d almost call _old_. 

“Yes.” She cringes back at the sound of Whitehall’s voice, but Ward - or whoever this is - tightens his hold on her shoulder so much that she can’t move without hurting herself. “She gave us the key to the obelisk herself just before we found her out as a mole. Kind of her to provide us with the answers we sought _and_  a subject to test them on.”

Those eyes that are not Ward’s find hers again. She thinks she might see pity in their depths.

“Kind of her,” he echoes slowly. She can’t help but remember the hours she spent in her own lab, an experiment of her own making. His hand moves to the back of her neck, kneading gently there and sending a pleasant burn along her skin. “I think it’s time we returned that kindness.”

She tries to pull away again, but stops when a faint crackling draws her attention back to his frost-covered hand. Thin veins appear in the smooth white film before it bursts apart entirely. The resulting cloud of ice and dust flies in her face and down her throat. For a moment she’s sure she’ll choke, but she doesn’t. She breathes. More easily than she has since the moment she saw her own image on those computer screens in the lab.

The fear is gone. The pain is gone. Even the cold clinging to every inch of her is no longer an annoyance. She smiles - a real, true smile that not even Daniel Whitehall’s presence can frighten away.

The man who is not Ward holds her face between his broad hands and wears a smile to match her own. “You will be the first of many,” he says. “Together, you and I will save the world.”

She doesn’t bother with agreement or questions. She doesn’t care what they do, so long as he allows her to remain with him.

 

 

 **prompt:**  cacophony

 

Jemma spends the journey with her hands pressed tight over her ears and her eyes screwed shut. She focuses on the beat of her own heart and the warmth of the arms surrounding her to better ignore the mess of action and noise that seems to be everywhere on this planet. 

After an unbearably long time, she’s set gently on the ground. Once she’s steady, she’s left alone and-

It stops.

Everything.

Everything stops. 

She drops her hands in relief and looks around at the oddly patterned walls with the first smile she’s truly felt since she left Maveth.

He returns it as he returns to her side, stepping readily into her personal space to wrap her in his arms again. “Better?” he asks.

“Where are we?” There’s no echo. She grew used to them on the planet, even the faintest of them were everywhere, but here there’s nothing, like her voice only goes on and on and on with nothing to send it back at her. She turns her face to him and answers her own question. “An anechoic chamber?”

He nods briefly. “I thought a little silence would do you good.”

This isn’t just silence. It’s _complete_ silence, so deep that if she stays in here too long, she’ll go mad.

She leans into him. “Thank you.” His hand rubs up and down her back the way Will’s used to. She should push him away for that, but this is the most peace she’s felt in days. “Not just for this.”

His hand moves to the back of her head and he plants a kiss on her hair. “I would never have left you there. You know that.”

She does.

 

 

 **prompt:** one adjusting the other's jewelry ~~/necktie/etc~~

 

Jemma has got her arms around a very dangerous man’s neck. She’s in the midst of the very delicate task of both dancing - with a man who cannot dance - and angling his head so it’s at precisely the correct angle to miss her face and land on her cleavage. Her hips are so close to his they might as well be having sex at this very moment.

“Not that I mind,” he says, his hands sliding around to cup her arse, “helpin’ you make the boyfriend jealous an’ all, but I do kinda expect some delivery on the investment.”

She laughs in the precise manner May coached her on and shoots it over his shoulder to where Fitz is scowling in a booth - or meant to be scowling, he’s stopped for some reason and if her mark were looking his way it would completely derail the plan to see him so out of character.

“He is most certainly _not_ my boyfriend,” she says, making sure the mark’s focus remains on her, “not anymore.”

His eyes lift to her face. “So there’s an opening?” If there were, he’s one of the last men in the world she’d consider for filling it, but that thought only half-forms in her brain before she realizes her mark’s expression has suddenly turned into an almost carbon copy of Fitz’s.

“No, there’s not.” The low voice travels right up her spine and she’s suddenly acutely aware of every inch of flesh left bare by the outfit Daisy poured her into for this mission. Coulson and Fitz both argued against the low back and now she wishes she’d paid them more mind.

Her mark’s hands lift away from her and, as he steps back, she can see them shaking. “S-s-sir.”

“ _Leave_.”

And he does.

Jemma doesn’t move; she holds Fitz’s terrified gaze until a gentle pressure on her shoulder prompts her to turn. She saw herself that the Inhuman from the planet survived and that it came back wearing Ward’s face. She can, in fact, remember that heart-stopping moment in Coulson’s office with painful clarity. But, as it turns out, seeing it on a shoddy surveillance feed and seeing it in the flesh are two  _very_ different things.

Its eyes meet hers and slide down - she can feel the pass of its gaze like a touch and struggles not to squirm - all the way to the skin between her breasts (maybe she really _should_ have listened to Coulson and Fitz’s whining) where a bright red pendant hangs, sure to draw anyone’s attention straight to her cleavage. The necklace was a calculated choice meant to grant her access to this particular bar, one patronized almost exclusively by HYDRA agents, and has done wonders to that particular end. At the moment, however, she wishes it hadn’t worked at all. 

The Inhuman reaches out idly, as though it has every right to do so, and lifts the pendant to better see. Its fingertips brush the sensitive skin on the inside of her breast, sending a jolt to her core, and her breath catches against her will.

“Brazen,” It says. It drops the necklace and the metal settles, warm and familiar, against her skin. “But I must say, I do like to see you wearing my symbol.”

 

 

 **prompt:**  hand kiss

 

People are scared. The lab is unusually quiet. Jemma’s fellow scientists work with minimal conversation and careful precision, fearful of drawing attention to themselves with an accidental noise of any sort. At least two of them are missing - Ogawa and Nolting, who never came back from their earlier meeting upstairs - but Jemma doesn’t dare take a closer look to be certain they’re the only ones. 

There are fewer guards as well. A great deal fewer. Anywhere between six and eight men typically stand at the edges of the lab, keeping watch, but today there are only two. And they appear squirrelly, eager to be gone from here.

“-killed Bakshi,” Jemma hears Devito say to Kenneth. “Nothing left but bones.”

A chill runs up Jemma’s spine. She doesn’t want to imagine how such a thing was accomplished, but her mind provides no end of possibilities anyway. 

To drown out the images and to steady her hands as she works, she practices her next report to Coulson. It’s calming, in a way, to know she’s here for a reason other than the job HYDRA’s set her to, that the fear clawing at the inside of her ribs serves a greater purpose.

It isn’t _terribly_ calming, but it’s enough she doesn’t drop her test tubes.

There’s someone new upstairs, someone powerful. She thinks he might even be a Gifted, given the way she heard some of the agents in the halls talking as she made her way to the bathroom earlier. Some of the things they said … one of the accountants actually likened him to a _god_.

Which might be understandable if the other rumor is true: that Whitehall, the man all of them have lived in fear of up to this point, is up in his office prostrating himself, literally _begging_ for the approval of this newcomer. 

A headache presses behind her eyes. Whatever this new head may be, if he’s half as terrible as all of HYDRA thinks, Coulson will need to be informed as soon as possible. His recent admonition that she stop reporting in via payphone rings in her ears, but she resolves to ignore it. This news is too important to wait or to risk it being missed.

“Oh, _Jemma_.”

She notices too late the hush that’s fallen over the lab and the cold weight of dread that accompanies it. But when she turns, it’s with a kind of horror all her own.

“Ward,” she breathes. The lab bench digs into her lower back and she fights to keep her hands from shaking. The last time she saw him he was literally forcing her to relive her worst fear, and the months since, with the (what she now knows to be erroneous) knowledge that he perished at CyberTek, have been little solace as nightmares continue to plague her. And now he’s here, in the flesh, like some phantom from her subconscious brought to life.

“You have been very bad, haven’t you?” He easily forces one of her hands to release its death grip on the lab bench. His cold lips brush against her knuckles, chilling her as much as the knowledge that this gentle, almost sweet act can be nothing more than a game. He’s _toying_ with her, the cat that’s caught the mouse. 

She wants to scream, but she doesn’t dare. The headache pounds heavily in her skull as her mind lays bare the truth of what’s happened. Of course he’d have fallen in with this new, terrifying head. Of course he’d worm his way back into all of their lives. Of course he’d _survive_.

He stills briefly and then his eyes focus on hers and his head tips to one side in careful consideration. There’s something about the motion that strikes her as animalistic and she realizes suddenly she was wrong, he _didn’t_ survive.

“No,” he says calmly, sliding a hand into her hair. The pressure behind her eyes follows the motion, growing with such intensity that her vision blurs and she has to curl into his ready embrace or slip to the floor in a dead faint. His body is as cold as his lips, leeching warmth from her and leaving her shivering. He presses another kiss to the crown of her head. “But you will,” he promises. And as she loses the battle and her body succumbs to whatever it is he’s doing, dragging her down into the relief of unconsciousness, she thinks it sounds like a threat.

 


	21. let me help you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everyone knows soulmarks don't change. Jemma knows that's a lie.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt "let me help you."

She has to grow accustomed to her own face again. There’s the scar over her eye of course, and then how much thinner she is, how haunted her eyes have become. She doesn’t recognize herself, the first time. But when she looks again - one cleansing shower later - she at least knows the woman staring back is her and is prepared for the additional changes she finds with her robe still hanging on the hook behind her. 

The thinness of her face is nothing to the rest of her. She lifts a hand to her painfully small stomach and then higher to her ribs. She could count them with no trouble at all.

Her eyes catch on the shadow beneath her breasts. They’re as ravaged as the rest of her by her time in that hell, allowing her a better view than she would otherwise have.

Soulmarks don’t change. Not ever. They clear up, turning from misshapen blobs to legible words as the human body grows and matures, and they’ll even fade and blur in those sad cases where one soulmate dies long before the other. But they never _change_. And that’s precisely what Jemma would say if asked about the subject.

But she’d know it was a lie.

She fingers the chicken scratch on her skin. The words are as familiar to her as her own name, but the letters … they’re familiar in a different way.

She turns away from the mirror, refusing to look back even after she’s got her robe on.

 

* * *

 

Jemma carefully peels away the bloody bandages Ward wrapped her in earlier. He did that false apology thing he’s so good at while he applied them, saying he wouldn’t have done so much damage if only Fitz had given in sooner, if only Coulson hadn’t gone after his brother, if only, if only, if only.

Jemma would have slapped him if moving wouldn’t have hurt too much.

Now she sits in a HYDRA base, waiting for Malick to arrive and pass judgment over her. Or perhaps waiting for worse, but she tries not to think about that. Instead she focuses on keeping her whimpers of pain from sounding too pitiful - or at the very least too loud, as the guards have given her only a few feet of breathing room while she tends to her wounds.

Ward didn’t touch her mark. She thinks perhaps he meant it as a kindness, tearing into her everywhere _but_ there. She hates him for that, as much as for the false apologies; at least if he had damaged it, she wouldn’t have to see the carefully formed letters, each one precise and regimented and wholly different from what they were after she returned from Maveth. But familiar, still heartbreakingly familiar.

A hand curls around hers to pull away more of the bandages. She hisses in a breath from the air touching her open wounds and the invasion of her space both.

“Let me help you.” It’s Ward’s voice, though it’s too thin, as though each puff of air is a monumental effort. But those aren’t his words. They’re hers. Hers and-

She can see It moving beneath Ward’s skin when she dares look at him. Malick is hovering over his shoulder, and the guards all stand at perfect attention. She wonders how badly she would have to startle them to force one to draw his sidearm.

“ _No_.” The word is barely a breath of air, but there’s a force behind it that would bring her to her knees if she weren’t already sitting. He holds her eyes for long seconds until finally she lets the thought go, accepts that he won’t allow her to escape by that route. 

Once they have an understanding, he resumes unwinding the bandages, the same hands that tore into her now tend her with even more care than they did hours ago. In the background, Malick quietly orders men and resources moved. She hears enough to know they’re going to ground, hiding until they’re ready to attack SHIELD in force, but she isn’t truly listening to him. She’s focusing on the thing working over her, on the little differences between him and the man who occupied that body up until a few hours ago, and, most importantly, on his fingers brushing over her skin.

She feels pain, naturally, and revulsion, but none of the pleasant buzz that she’s come to expect from this moment. Coulson, in a drunken moment of romanticism, once said that it was nearly impossible to keep his hands off his soulmate for hours after he met her. But Jemma would gladly see an end to this creature’s hands on her body.

“You’re not him,” she says. She thought - feared - that he had to be, it was the only explanation for how her mark has changed no less than four times over the course of her life. But this, the lack of pleasure at his nearness, means he can’t be. She’s never been so happy to be proven wrong.

He smiles, a small, knowing curve of his lips. He gently sets the bandage he’s been working on in place and then begins stripping himself of the desert camo Ward wore to the planet. She can’t help the note of horror she emits when she lays eyes on his chest. She’s seen this body damaged no small number of times and ways, but nothing like the dented mess of bones that ended Ward’s life. It’s so bad she doesn’t notice at first what he’s disrobed to show her, but then her eyes settle on the dark words scrawled in her own handwriting under one of the shattered ribs. Words that weren’t there more than a year ago when she last tended Ward's wounds. They seem to mock her. _You’re not him._

But he is.

 


	22. ficlets (nsfw-ish)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Obvious warnings apply.

 

 **prompt:** cuddling in a blanket fort

 

Jemma feels pleasantly heavy. Her nerves are still humming, but in that lovely, afterglow way. She curls her fingers in his hair, tugging gently at the short strands while he kisses his way up her thigh.

“Too soon,” she whines, twisting her legs together.

His teeth on her skin send a jolt through her even though it’s only the edge of his smile. “Fine,” he sighs, sounding as though not eating her out is the greatest sacrifice he could make. 

She opens her eyes on the dreamy lights filtering through the circle of blankets hung to keep the world at bay. Which is silly, seeing as the whole world’s in his head always. She reaches for the edge of one and his hand clamps down on her wrist.

“No,” he says. “We’re having private time. No worrying about the outside world.”

She lifts her knees to his sides and uses them to pull him up. “There are no worries,” she reminds him as she snakes her arms around his neck. She kisses his jaw. “No fear.” She kisses his cheek. “No pain.” His chin. “No want.” She tips her head and shifts her hips. “Mostly.” She stops at his mouth, lips resting a hair’s breadth from his. “You saved the world.”

His arms brace on either side of her head, his hands play with her hair and she extends her neck to press into them. “With your help,” he reminds her. He buries his words in her neck. “Your research, your designs.”

She hums. If he keeps going like that, it won’t be too soon much longer.

“Remind me how you did it,” he whispers. 

She frowns. He knows how she did it.

He- he was there with her every step of the way.

Wasn’t he?

He kisses her temple. “You hid your research on the GH-325 from SHIELD after they proved themselves unworthy. You secreted samples from the Kree who attempted to kill Daisy after her transition.” He lifts over her to slot a knee between her thighs. “Remind me how, love. Remind me where you hid them.”

Her head tips back as she seeks to both grind down against the lovely pressure he’s providing and find the answers in her very distracted mind.

 

* * *

 

Hive leaves her sated and sleeping. He pushes aside the blankets and side-steps through the narrow space to the storage container’s door. Outside, the abandoned mall they’re using is brightly lit by the sun through the unfinished ceiling. He blinks to clear his vision after so long with her.

Daisy’s beside him in an instant. “Is she-”

“I told you I would not harm her,” he says, gently chiding. Her shoulders hunch, but she still throws a worried look at the container.

He lifts his eyes to the ring of tables where Radcliffe is working, still fiddling futilely with Daisy’s blood. James stands over him, no doubt providing pointless and infuriating commentary.

“Come,” Hive says. “I have a mission for you.”

“You got the coordinates?” Daisy asks, her worries forgotten beneath her excitement.

“Yes. I got the coordinates.” Soon they’ll have all they need to see this world cleansed. Thanks to Jemma.

 

 

 **prompt:** how about you put that down and we talk

 

The plan is progressing. Not as quickly as Hive would have preferred, but he has waited ten thousand years, he can wait a little longer - even if it is galling to do so. He has the _means_ of reaching his goal and passed along the will accomplish it to his followers. Even the human doctor is suitably enamored of his vision to work diligently. 

There is, at this juncture, only one piece of the puzzle that refuses to fall into place and continuously slows his progress. 

He studies the records Daisy purloined from SHIELD, hoping to find what he seeks in them before-

The door opens and he _knows_. Perhaps it’s only Grant Ward’s carefully honed senses, but Hive thinks it might just be that she’s that far under his skin; it isn’t possible for her to enter a room without drawing his attention.

Still, he must try. He has work to do - important work. He stares at the columns of names and numbers, hunting for those he seeks. 

Behind him, she approaches slowly. Her footfalls are light on the floor and he cannot help but imagine the way her hips move with each of them, the gentle canting of a woman’s body in motion.

After ten thousand years of solitude, he has an impressive imagination for such things.

Her chest presses to his back and her lips to his shoulder. He closes his eyes on the screen, done with pretending he’s paid mind to a single thing on it since the moment she entered the room. Her delicate hand slides along his arm to pluck the tablet from his grasp.

“How about you put that down,” Jemma says while her other hand undoes the first two buttons of his coat without a moment’s hesitation, “and we’ll talk?”

He turns in her grasp. She’s so _small_ next to him, but he can’t seem to pull away from her. 

“Talk?” he asks while her hands move to the next buttons. Conversation doesn’t appear to be her aim. “About what?”

She tips her head and a small smile graces her lips. He has died for that smile.

“Chemistry.”

“Have you finally deigned to aide Radcliffe?” It’s why she’s here, why he stole her from SHIELD. His children must have the best and she is assuredly that - now if only she will  _help_.

“Neural chemistry,” she amends coyly. “Specifically in regards to the brain’s pleasure centers.”

He hums lowly. His heart - or perhaps only the illusion of one, he’s not certain even these many centuries later exactly how close his host’s physiology is to that of a standard human while he’s in residence - pounds in his chest and he feels a stirring which urges him to move closer to her. 

He has work to do, a world to bring to peace. She has refused to help Radcliffe at every turn and acts as a distraction - a lovely, enchanting distraction - with ever greater frequency. He should set her aside, deny her until a time of his choosing.

His hands stiffen on her hips - when they landed there, he will never be able to say with any certainty - and he steels himself to push her away.

She tips her head back to fix him with one of her brilliant smiles. “What do you think of a little experimentation?” She drops to her knees to better reach the lowest of his buttons and then moves deeper to the one on his pants.

She plays dirty - but then that is no surprise, both Will and Grant were well acquainted with that side of her personality. 

Hive swallows down a gasp as her fingers move past fabric to his sensitive skin. He will indulge her this one last time; the next time he will deny her. 

He will.

 

 

 **prompt:**  you haven't touched your food

 

They say misery loves company, but Jemma doesn’t see it. No matter how long she watches the footage of chaos and destruction from around the globe, it only serves to aggravate her own hurts,

Of course _breathing_ aggravates her hurts so that isn’t saying much.

“You’re not eating.”

There’s a half-hearted instinct somewhere deep inside her to tense - she will certainly not be _flinching_ \- at the sound of the voice but it never sees fruition. The pain accompanying such an action would be far too great with no benefit at all; she’ll stay where she is and remain in manageable levels of discomfort.

The bed shifts, though only a little, not nearly enough to disrupt her. “ _Jemma_.” His coaxing tone is soft and raspy and is certainly a result of the damage to his chest cavity, but the gentleness in it - whether it is there by design or not - tears at her heart.

The truth is that she would very much like to eat. The smell of food has permeated the room for nearly an hour now and the sound of him consuming his own meal, wet and loud as it may have been, had her stomach cramping in envy. The cart sits only at the side of the bed; she wouldn’t even have to get up completely to reach it. But she would have to sit up and that is more than she can bear.

She remembers Bobbi, smiling and joking while recovering from hours of torture. She wants to be strong like her. But Bobbi had the comfort of the Playground and her friends and, most important of all, a morphine drip. 

Jemma had one before she was moved to this room, but it came with words whispered seductively in her ear and images flashing before her eyes. 

“You need to eat,” he says, quietly insistent. 

She’s still watching the screens; much as she hates the subject matter, facing the bombing in Istanbul and the archival footage of the Holocaust is far preferable to facing _him_. But she can’t _ignore_ him and from the corner of her eye she sees his hand moving over the blankets. 

He won’t touch her, not without her consent, but it isn’t kindness. He can take away all her pain but he chooses not to, forcing her to first choose to _let_ him.

And oh, she wants to, but she doesn’t know anymore if it’s her own weakness or the result of what they started to do to her in that other room. She’s not sure she cares.

The smell of her waiting food seems, impossibly, to intensify. She wonders, even as her stomach cramps anew, whether this might be another of his powers. 

The cramping leads to a worsening of the pain in all the rest of her. It’s agony, knowing that only her own stubbornness is keeping her from relief.

She closes her eyes on the images of a murder-suicide in China. “Please,” she says, and it is embarrassingly like a moan.

He’s there in a heartbeat, shockingly fast for a living corpse. His cold hand on her cheek sends a chill through her, and she sighs, feeling better already. But that’s nothing to his kiss. It’s gentle and she would call it loving were it coming from anyone else. As it is, the best it can be is the shadow of loving, stolen from someone else.

No one’s told her, no one’s bothered to mention even once in her captivity what became of Will or Fitz, but she’s known Will was dead from the first moment she was wheeled into this room and this creature locked eyes with her.

Perhaps he can read her thoughts because the kiss intensifies, as does the relief that accompanies it. He rises up over her, and his tongue enters her mouth, and for the first time in hours her body aches with something other than pain.

He ends the kiss before she can do something she won’t be able to take back - like hold him to her, like roll into him, like pull aside the flimsy hospital gown she wears. He slides his forehead against hers to nuzzle into her hair. “Eat.”

She sits up, feeling only a faint tug where she hasn’t yet learned to accommodate the scarred skin on her abdomen. The food is tepid after waiting so long but it’s the most delicious thing Jemma’s ever tasted.

A hand moves idly along her spine while she eats and, though she doesn’t look, she knows he’s curled across her pillow, watching her. No doubt he considers this a victory.

He isn’t wrong.

 


	23. ficlets (soulmates)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Very short soulmates-themed drabbles.

 

 **prompt:** run

 

The ground ahead of Jemma opens up into a shallow creek. She jumps, grasps a tree branch, heaves. Bark digs into her skin, but in the end she’s on the other side and running again. 

Fear of what’s behind her dogs her steps, spurring her to go faster, but if she isn’t careful, if she doesn’t pace herself for the long distance ahead, she’ll exhaust herself. And then she’ll be caught before she’s made it anywhere at all. So she focuses on the obstacles blocking her path - over this rock, around that bush, under that branch - uses them to drown out the frantic worry clawing at the back of her mind.

She’s barely made it another quarter of a mile before she hears it. Air is rushing past her ears, but beneath it she can hear the wind, like sand. Like a sandstorm in the middle of the woods.

There’s blood seeping between her closed fingers.

Now she does run faster. Until her thighs and calves burn, and her lungs ache, and the only thing louder than the wind is her own gasping, terrified breaths. When the sand obscures her visions, when she can no longer see what’s ahead of her and would gladly keep going into that danger if only it meant freedom, a chest materializes out of the storm. Arms encircle her, pulling her tight against him. 

She struggles. She hits him and kicks him and hurls insults in between demands that he let her go. None of it does any good at all. He’s like stone, holding her until she exhausts herself and collapses against him.

“I don’t want you,” she says. Her eyes are half-shut on the forest around them, picturesque once more now that he’s back in one piece. His heart - or whatever monstrous approximation of one the Kree gave him - beats beneath her ear, and his chin rests on the top of her head. It’s a comfortable weight.

His fingers brush along her side and, even through the layers of her shirt and the jacket she stole from the guard she shot on her way out, the contact sends a wave of warm desire along her nerves. “Yes,” he says, his words rumbling through her a counterpoint to the way her soul mark still buzzes from his touch, “you do.”

She closes her eyes and doesn’t resist when he lifts her into his arms. She hates him for being right more than for any of the things he’s done.

 

 

 **prompt:** I've never been one for dreams

 

“I’ve never been one for dreams,” he says. 

Jemma presses herself closer to the wall to hide her slide to the left. There’s a tray of food there and she can just see the glint of a knife buried in the remains of a chicken. 

“It’s not safe. It would have been so easy to lose myself in the fantasies of a life other than that desert hell and never awaken.” His faraway gaze sharpens and settles on her. “And, later, in you.”

She stiffens at the implications. The most obvious meaning is of course Will. He spent four months alone on Maveth with the remains of Will’s mind to entertain him. He might have passed the time engaging in a sort of retroactive voyeurism.

Or he might mean something else entirely.

He smiles, so much gentler than Ward ever did, and reaches for her cheek. The thrill that goes through her at the contact - it’s disgust. It has to be disgust. It’s not her heart leaping for joy now that it’s _finally_ found its other half.

“I’m sorry,” he says, “that it was only the once. But I told you I’d find a way to reach you.”

A sob claws its way up her throat. He’s _lying_. He’s read her mind or- or something. There is no possible way he’s the man from her one and only soul dream.

Most people have several over the course of their lives, but Jemma’s only had the one. It happened when she’d fallen asleep studying for her second PhD and she nearly attributed it to the stress, except that the ache in her heart was too keen to pin on anything other than a bone-deep longing.

He held her in her dream, clung to her and apologized in a hopeless sort of way. He was angry as well, angry at … someone. He never said. What he did say was that he would never see her in her dreams again, it was too dangerous, but that he would find a way to reach her if he had to rip the stars from the sky.

She hadn’t thought he meant it literally.

“You’re not him,” she says, her voice sounding small and broken even to her own ears. “You’re _not_.”

He smiles sadly. “You may not believe I’m yours, but I have waited eons for you, I’d know you anywhere.”

His thumb slides along her cheek and the buzz the slight pressure evokes shoots straight to her core, causing her to gasp. He swallows up the sound, and the kiss is a million times more than his touch was. Her heart positively sings and her body feels like it’s on fire.

He’s a monster in every sense of the word, but she can’t fight herself. Her soul’s been aching for him all her life and it hasn’t the will to fight him, no matter what he may be. It’s easy then, to wrap herself around him so that he can take her to the bed placed so conveniently across the room.

 

 

 **prompt:**  you always did look good in red (semi-inspired by [this biospecialist gifset](http://shineyma.tumblr.com/post/143146087262/biospecialist-au-soulmates))

 

Her heart’s pounding, near fit to burst out of her chest. Her fear of him is too much for her to keep her eyes on him; she stumbles over her own feet, searching over her shoulder for an escape, but the dark hallway offers none. She is _aware_ of him though, enough that she knows when he’s stopped in his pursuit of her.

“You always did look good in red,” he all but purrs. 

Her head whips around and she barely notes the distance between them before she’s looking down to see that her jacket really is-

The pounding stops. Everything goes very still and very quiet. She feels like she’s in that sandstorm again, at the point where the wind grew so loud and continuous around her that her mind naturally cut it out, treated it as unimportant white noise.

Her jacket is red.

She knew it was red. She bought it last year when she and Skye went on a shopping trip. She didn’t even like it much but it looked _fun_ and they were both so determined to enjoy themselves on their first day out of the Playground after weeks locked in for safety’s sake. But it was last year so she could see the color then …

She hasn’t been able to see color for three months.

Hive’s knuckles gently tip her chin up and her chest seizes as much at the proximity as at the familiar stirring of _want_ that used to accompany Ward’s touch. It was the soulbond, her innermost parts reaching out for his, desperate to be joined with her other half. 

But that was severed _three months ago_. It’s a constant ache that will never leave her. She _knows that_. So why does it feel hale and whole now?

“What did you do to me?” she demands and is impressed with the steadiness of her voice. Shock and anger have overpowered her fear well enough she can make a stand, though her feet still ache to run.

“I brought you a gift,” he says serenely. His fingers move languidly along her jaw, into her hair. It’s precisely the way Ward used to touch her, with all of the same tenderness and jealousy. “The belonging and oneness of Grant Ward’s soulbond,” he says, and no matter how she screams at herself to pull away as he leans closer, she can’t find the will to break the contact she’s been aching for, “and all of Will Daniels’ love and devotion.”

His other hand slides around her hip, pulling her to him. As he’s laid it out, it’s precisely what she so often wished she could have with Will. He was good and kind and truly loved her, more than her soulmate ever did. If she could have somehow made him her soulmate rather than Ward, who betrayed her and hurt her at every turn, it would have been well worth the sacrifice of her life on Earth.

But Hive isn’t Will and he isn’t Ward. He’s a monster who’s stolen their memories, stolen the _most sacred part_ of Ward. _Her_  part of him.

He kisses her. She’s stiff and cold and _hates_ him. Hates him when he kisses her with all of Will’s gentleness and uncertainty, hates him when he holds her with all of Ward’s strength and protection, and hates him most of all when she melts into him.

 


	24. distraction sex

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Obvious warnings apply.

His whole body feels heavy and he’s got that pleasant post-sex drowsy thing going on. Jemma’s half on top of him and he’s guessing, from the little sigh she just let out, she’s feeling the same. He’s more than a little proud of that.

He traces a hand up and down her spine, a casually possessive move. She’s limp-limbed because of the things _he_ did to her. She’s clinging tight to _him_ as she drifts off to sleep. She’s warming _his_ bed. She’s his.

The victory of winning her over so completely is almost as good as the victory of getting her away from SHIELD.

But that one’s gonna be fun in a whole different way and, that in mind, he’s gotta get up and get working on just how to make Coulson hurt over this. 

“ _No_ ,” she whines - that’s another point for his pride - and tries to hold him down.

“I gotta go, baby,” he says, “work to do.”

He expects the reminder to give her pause, enough he can get away, but it’s him who’s thrown for a loop when he sits up.

He doesn’t recognize this room.

It’s all stark white and dark, wide windows. Where are they?

A wide-eyed face appears briefly in one of the windows. He doesn’t recognize it - but he does at the same time. He remembers a hallway, a pressure on his head so intense he thought it would burst, and then-

She sits up on her knees behind him. Her hands slide easily over his skin, her lips scrape along the curve of his jaw.

“Come back to bed,” she whispers huskily.

“I have to-” he starts, but it’s weak. She’s doing that thing he loves where she touches him, reminds him he’s not alone in the universe. When she catches his mouth with hers, it’s the easiest thing in the world to fall into her. 

She laughs when he touches her just there, the spot he was delighted to discover gets her hot and giggly all at once. She touches his cheek. “Will.”

He grins. He can’t help it. She’s the best thing in this whole mess of a world and she’s his.

How’d he get to be so lucky?

He kisses her and she pulls at him, puts her hands between them and it’s her who brings them together but it’s him who renders her speechless. He’s pretty damn proud.

He falls asleep with his face pressed into the curve of her neck, drinking in the sweat-warmed smell of _woman_ that is decidedly Jemma.

 

* * *

 

She comes awake all at once. He’s on top of her, but this time there’s nothing familiar at all in his expression. His hands grip her forearms tight enough she’s sure to bruise and, with every inch of him pressing into every inch of her, she’s keenly aware of how easy it would be for him to strip her to the bone.

“You think you can trap me?” he demands. Yes, even brimming with rage that superior tone is all Hive. He’s back. 

There’s no way of telling yet whether it’s for good or just a hiccup before his mind loses focus again. Either way, she is in very real danger here and very much on her own. It’s up to her to talk him back down. Or drive him to proving he can’t be.

The adrenaline might be making her a little giddy because she presses her hips up into his and says, “Obviously.”

He hisses in a breath. She doesn’t think it’s entirely anger. Good. She still might be able to knock something loose in there.

Slowly, his fury settles into a cruel smile. “Diverting as you have been, we’re done here.”

The weight on her arms increases; he means to push away. She stalls him with an ankle slid along the back of his calf.

“Fine,” she says as his hesitation draws on. “Go.” She twists her wrists as much as she’s able - which isn’t much. “I can finish on my own - or maybe I’ll find another agent to help me. I’m sure _someone_ will survive whatever it is you’re about to-”

He cuts her off with a furious kiss. It hurts - more for how often she’s been kissed in the very recent past, even more for how different it is from the last kisses he gave her - but the pain is just this side of too much. She writhes under him, eager first for friction and then for space to breathe. 

Briefly, she fears he intends on suffocating her.

But then he draws back, his dark eyes still heavy with that rage. “You’re mine,” he says. One of his hands catches her by the chin. If she could, she would moan as molten agony seeps along her freed arm. “My sacrifice. Do you understand?”

As she won’t be answering in the affirmative and his hold makes any answer rather difficult, she makes no attempt to respond at all.

He smiles as though she had. “You will.” He lowers himself to whisper in her ear. “And then, when I kill your friends, you will know better than to beg for mercy.”

He presses his mouth to her neck and his fingers find her overly sensitive center. In no time at all he has her incapable of begging for anything at all, no matter whether she’d like to.

 


	25. the wrong kiss

Jemma hesitates. She wasn’t expecting to be granted access to the inner sanctum only to find Mace _sleeping_. If he is sleeping, that is…

“Sir?” she asks, her voice carefully balanced between gentle and respectful. The lines on his face do not ease and his eyes remain shut. Damn.

She tries again, more than once, before finally rounding the desk and setting her tablet and case on top of it so that she can jostle his shoulder. “Sir?”

His eyes snap open, and while they do seem to focus on her, there’s no doubt in her mind that his thoughts are still far, _far_ away. That much becomes even more obvious when he _kisses her._

All of a sudden his hand is cushioning her neck and his lips are on hers. And all her genius brain can see fit to contribute to the moment is a series of exclamation and question marks.

Finally, after what seems to be an unbearably long time but what can truly have been only a second or two, her hands spring into action, pushing him away.

“Sorry,” he says immediately, pressing the heels of his hands over his eyes. “God, I’m sorry. That was-”

“It’s all right.” It’s not. For one, she doesn’t like him in the least and for another there’s Fitz, but it is at least understandable so she’s willing to look past it.

And, she thinks as she grabs her things and pointedly rounds the desk once more, it’s kind of Fitz’s fault. He’s the one who’s began saying months ago that fighting Hive would have been easier if only he’d had the time to create a portable, point-and-shoot version of the memory machine rather than having Mack disassemble and reassemble all its components in a very reckless gamble that it would even work in the new configuration. And he’s also the one who was fiddling with the latest prototype when Mace walked unexpectedly into the lab this morning.

“No,” Mace says, “it’s not. That was completely inappropriate, Agent Simmons, and I am truly sorry. I fully understand if you-”

“You were dreaming,” she says, feeling a flush climb up her neck, “likely of a very similar circumstance when someone it would not have been inappropriate to- to-” she gestures to the spot she just occupied, unable to put to words that he _kissed her_. And it was a good kiss too. Very good. Precisely the combination of rough and gentle she prefers. Were he someone she actually liked, Fitz might be in some danger.

And the flush deepens and she would very much like to crawl into the earth and die now.

“I imagine you cared very deeply for whoever that was and I’m sorry for pulling you from such a pleasant memory, I’m sure they haven’t all been.”

His expression in inscrutable, but he nods and seems to relax. “So what brings you here?” he asks, taking on a forcefully casual tone. 

She wakes her tablet, intending on showing him her research should he require more than just her verbal report. “The side project you sent me on,” she says tightly, hoping to make it quite clear that while she forgives him the kiss, she does _not_ forgive him for black bagging her and sending her off to secretly help Senator Nadeer’s brother complete his transition, “helped me reach a breakthrough with my study of the Primitives’ DNA.”

“The Primitives?” Mace is up and joining her at that. 

“Yes. I did ask you,” she reminds him, wondering if he’s having trouble remembering, “if I could bring some here. For testing.”

“I thought you meant their _minds_ ,” he mutters, looking at the tablet. She taps it, bringing up the security footage of her last few run-throughs before handing it over.

“I know human experimentation is generally frowned upon, but I assure you I did every possible trial with tissue and blood samples beforehand. There was really nowhere else to go after that and, given the recent developments, you can understand why I felt it necessary to act.”

Two of the Primitives have died in the last month. Not from injury or some flaw in their altered physiology, they simply laid down and never got up again. All of them have been showing varying signs of depression since Hive’s death and it’s finally beginning to reach a head. 

“Something had to be done,” Mace says, his thoughts seeming to echo hers. Though he still doesn’t sound pleased. “Wait. What is this?”

It’s the test on Agent Spada. Like all the rest, the chrysalis forms, just like with a typical terragenesis. But unlike the rest, who all emerged looking like their old, human selves, Spada emerged covered in feathers.

“Ah. Yes, well, that’s the thing.” She opens the case and gestures to the vial of pale golden formula nestled to one side of the syringe. “I wasn’t able to undo the transformation, only complete it.”

Mace’s head snaps in her direction so quickly she feels sympathetic whiplash. “They’re Inhuman? Humans turned Inhuman?”

She nods while worrying her lip. It’s not ideal. She would never say so in Daisy’s presence, but it would be far better for these poor people if they could resume their old, human lives. To be finally cured of what Hive did to them, only to be changed all over again, will be its own kind of trial. And for people already suffering mentally…

She sighs and sets aside those thoughts. “And to that end, I realize it’s completely unethical, but eventually someone will figure it out and we’d best be prepared...”

Mace lets the tablet slip to the desktop while arching one eyebrow at her. Jemma lifts another vial from the case, this one the expected bright blue of the terragen crystals. “This is what Hive was after,” she says, “theoretically, of course. I can’t very well justify testing it on a healthy human being.” 

He takes the vial from her, and while his expression is still unreadable, she thinks perhaps there’s a shade of horror in it. 

“It was the natural result of the research I’d already done,” she says, feeling the need to defend her actions even though she feels suddenly deeply tired. Between the trials and the tests and Fitz’s shooting Mace, it’s been an unaccountably long day, and now that she’s reported in on it all, she’d like it to be over. “Could never help doing something…” she mutters softly while Mace continues to look over her research.

“When the odds are impossible,” he finishes. For a moment, just a moment, it seems right and natural and she doesn’t realize how wrong it is for him - or anyone for that matter - to be saying those words. 

By the time she does realize, he has her pinned between him and the desk.

“Let me go,” she says, trying to shove at him, but he’s as immovable as ever. She gives up, knowing better than to exhaust herself. If she screams for help, will the guard outside rush in to save her? No, she realizes, he won’t. It’s Tsui tonight. He’s Inhuman as well. “Jeffrey Mace wasn’t Inhuman, was he?”

“No,” Hive - will she _ever_ be rid of him? - says calmly while his hands work around her. She wants to look to see what he’s doing, but there’s some primitive instinct telling her to keep her eyes fixed on the danger ahead of her. “He was not. But he has been most useful.”

His eye catches hers and he pauses with a slight frown. One of his hands lifts to stroke her cheek and she can’t repress her shudder. “Of course it would be you, wouldn’t it?” he asks, almost sounding sorry. “Always the thorn in my side.”

Her fear fades in a wave of pure rage. “I’m so sorry I was a bother while I was struggling to survive in the hell you created.”

He smiles at that, absurdly pleased. “But you always make up for it, don’t you? If it wasn’t for you escaping, I wouldn’t have made it home.”

The same guilt that spurred her to test on the Primitives claws at her gut. She’d thought, by curing them, that it would finally be gone. Now she doubts she’ll ever be free of it.

“And now,” he says, back to fussing with something on the desk, “while you may have found me out - which I admit is at least partially Will’s fault, he does hate to keep quiet while you’re around - you’ve also given me the means to ensure you keep quiet about it.”

_No._

She sees the syringe for only a moment before she feels it in the side of her neck. 

She hasn’t tested the formula, she thinks. There’s the chance, the very slim one, that it will kill her.  

Hive’s hand kneads at the base of her skull in a way that is all too familiar and he holds her gaze steadily. “The pain won’t last long,” he promises as if that should make it better. And there _is_ pain, so intense she would be doubling over if the swiftly forming chrysalis wasn’t already holding her up. Her hands claw at him, not in attack but in some absurd hope that he’ll make it stop.

He smiles, and she remembers that he intends to. He tips his head, for a moment looking almost mockingly like Mace. “In a few minutes, you’ll be happy to comply with my every request. No more insubordination, no more running off after Coulson or colluding with dangerous fugitives. Just peace and satisfaction of knowing you’re working for the greater good.”

His smiling face is the last thing she sees before the stone covers her completely. She can only hope it’s the last thing she sees, period.

 


	26. snow (2)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another dead end...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Over on tumblr an anon asked for a follow-up to [snow](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6721735/chapters/19597048)

It looks like dust, but it’s not, it’s  _skin_. No matter how many times Gideon watches Hive sway (does he have to be so melodramatic about it? It’s brainwashing, same as they’ve been doing for centuries) a new Inhuman, he still struggles to hide his disgust with the how of it. There’s gotta be a better way to do this, one that doesn’t involve flinging his body parts at them.

The Inhuman - and Gideon’s never seen one who so well lived up to the name, the girl’s covered in quills - falls to her knees. “I’m sorry,” she says, voice somewhere between true apology and that blissful tone all of Hive’s followers speak in, “but I can’t see her.”

Gideon’s spirits deflate. Another dead end.

Oh, he’s sure this one will be useful - they all are - but Hive doesn’t give a damn about that. All he cares about is his soulmate, being held hostage against his good behavior, and none of the Inhumans have any idea where she is.

Gideon was really hoping the psychic would be able to tell them.

“But you will look,” Hive says, which is more than he said to the rest. Usually it’s just a benevolent acceptance of their inability to help them and he’s stalking back to his bed like a petulant teen, leaving Gideon to coax them into helping with HYDRA’s larger goals.

The Inhuman smiles in a way Gideon doesn’t like at all. “No,” she says - no one has ever defied Hive after he swayed them - “you will.” She pulls herself to her feet, looking like it pains her, and meets Gideon’s eyes. “Jemma Simmons went undercover in Whitehall’s HYDRA less than eight months ago.”

“So?” Gideon asks. If anything, that’s just more proof they shouldn’t be wasting time on this girl. Bad enough just her existence has brought all their plans to a screeching halt, but she’s  _SHIELD_.

“All employees were required to provide blood samples for routine testing. Even with Whitehall dead, someone should have them somewhere.”

“And what can we possibly do with-”

Hive’s hand wraps so tightly around his arm that Gideon fears the bone might break. “Bring me her blood,” he says, “and I will find her.”

Gideon stares, struck dumb by the hungry look on Hive’s face. He thinks of Hive removing his own skin to sway his people and, privately, hopes Daniel disposed of Simmons’ blood sample when she proved herself a traitor. Much as he wants her found so Hive can do more than sit in this room all day, he’s not sure he wants to see how he does it.

 


	27. snow (3)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A beginning.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "You're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."
> 
> Another follow-up to [snow](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6721735/chapters/19597048). You'll want to read that and the previous chapter first.

Jemma knows before she opens her eyes that something’s wrong. Instead of the thin mattress she’s spent weeks on, the one that no more cushioned her from the concrete floor than it protected her from its cold, there’s a feather soft mattress supporting her aching muscles. And instead of her own arm for a pillow, it’s something warm and solid that comes with fingers that trace through her hair.

She sits up once the hand finishes its next pass, figuring it’s best to get it over with.

She’s certainly not in the dank basement Skye’s father’s has kept her imprisoned in. This room is big and airy - though it has no windows - and brightly lit. Cal is nowhere to be seen at all. In fact, the only one here is…

The man sharing the bed with her is handsome. His face is soft, his features gentle as the hand that lifts her wrist.

It’s bandaged, she realizes. 

That’s right. She cut herself. Not because she meant it - she couldn’t very well kill herself that way with an accomplished surgeon as her jailer - but because she wanted to frighten Cal. If she could only get him to let her upstairs, only for a day or two while she recovered, perhaps she could escape.

And it seems she has. 

Somehow.

“I’m afraid I’m a bit confused,” she says carefully while he traces his fingers up and down the inside of her wrist, following the line she cut. “Is this a SHIELD facility?”

He lifts her arm and presses a kiss above her pulse point. “I am sorry I could not reach you sooner.”

There’s a misconception in his tone, one she simply must relieve him of. “Oh no, I didn’t- It was a bit reckless, yes, but it was an attempt at escaping  _Cal_ , not escaping anything else. I’m very fond of living.” She smiles broadly, hoping he believes her. She’d hate to go from that nightmare to a mental ward. And thinking of that, where are the others? Surely she can convince them of the truth.

He smiles back and presses a hand to her cheek. “You really are the most beautiful thing we have ever seen.”

Perhaps it’s his openly loving tone or his choice of words, or perhaps it’s his skin against hers. Whatever it is, she  _knows_ , and the breath goes right out of her. “You’re…?” she manages, voice thin and shocked.

He moves his hands away - she nearly follows - and carefully unbuttons the dark dress shirt he wears. Beneath it, she sees her mark, placed precisely over his heart. Just like hers. He’s her soulmate.

He’s also, assuming Cal’s mad ravings were correct, the Inhuman all the rest fear.

“I would not hurt you, Jemma,” he says, as if reading her thoughts. And maybe he does, she has no idea what powers he has that the other Inhumans find so frightening. His fingers wrap around her hand. “I know you have been told stories - and I do not pretend that all of them might not be true - but I ask you to at least decide for yourself. History can be cruel and legend even more so. Will you judge me for myself rather than the stories surrounding my name?”

She looks from their joined hands on the wine red sheets up to his face. She likes his face. It’s the first she’s seen aside from Cal’s in weeks, of course she likes it. But she’s free of there now, free and whole and with her soulmate.

She lays down, this time against him, nuzzling the bared skin of his chest. “Can we do that later?” she asks. “I think the blood loss is making me tired.”

His hand smoothes over her hair, holding her close. “Whatever you wish.”

She sinks back into the most restful sleep of her life, certain that no matter what comes next, it cannot be so terrible so long as she has him finally with her.

 


	28. stop talking

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the crash in Paradise Lost, Jemma faces the creature.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "Stop talking. Now."
> 
> Also this is at least 50% shineyma's fault

It’s been more than a year and Jemma still has nightmares about those months when Ward was playing - or perhaps not - at being insane in Vault D. But the eerie expressions, the relentless focus he would pin on whoever came to visit, the wild-eyed mania, it was nothing to the look on that face now. Even Ward had his limits.

“What do you want?” she asks. Her knees curl in the silk sheets and she forces them to hold still. Captured she may be, but she will not be frightened into a corner like a rabbit.

The creature’s smile falls somewhat. “I’m sorry,” it says.

She laughs because it’s easier than crying. “For what? For kidnapping me? For attacking us? For killing the man I loved?”

It steps forward and all of Jemma’s resolve flies right out of her head. She scrambles back until a pillow bunched up behind her stops her progress. The thunderous expression it wears is less unsettling than the unfathomable joy it wore earlier, but no more welcome.

It sighs out a pained breath and all that anger fades like it never was. “Jemma-” Whatever it thinks to follow that up with, it decides against it. Its hands - those aren’t Ward’s, the calluses and scars are all gone and she tries not to think of how that might have been accomplished - move to unbutton its coat.

Terrible fears flit through her mind, but thankfully it stops before it passes the fifth button. She has no trouble at all seeing what it means her to, her necklace catches the bright lights overhead easily.

“You- you-” she stutters, rage and heartbreak and disgust all combining to stifle her voice until she finally blurts out, “You stole my necklace!”

It tips its head. “For safe keeping.”

Somehow, that is the last straw. This monster has tormented her and her friends; killed good, decent people; it is responsible for losing them Bobbi and Hunter and causing her to be kidnapped after the plane she was on  _crashed_. But that it stole her necklace - and pretends to have done so as a kindness - is too much for her to take.

Before she even knows what she’s about, she’s at the edge of the bed, fists raised. She must have struck it as she can feel the heat of a recent impact, but has no memory of doing so prior to it catching her wrists in its hands.

“Jemma,” it says.

“Stop  _saying_  that!” she snaps. It’s not the way Ward said her name when he was pretending to flirt with her in the Bus’s dark corners or even the way Will did - it’s worse. There’s something deeply personal in the syllables and it is  _not allowed_.

Its hands twist loosely but firmly around her wrists and it make idle sweeps of its thumb over her skin. “How long did you know Will, Jemma? How long were you together on Maveth?”

She tips her head back. Not at the disregard for her very simple request or even the rudeness of asking a question to which they both know the answer, but at the audacity. How  _dare_  this thing speak his name?

Its hands tighten in warning when she fails to answer. “Six months,” she bites out.

“You found him shortly after you discovered food, yes?”

She nods. She told Will the story, laughed over it after the fact. Imprisoned though she may have been, the food he provided was much better than the flavorless tentacles she’d managed to scrounge up.

It bends its neck, like an adult coming down to a child’s level. “And how long can a human being live without food?”

“Three weeks,” she snaps. “What are you-”

“How long were you on Maveth, Jemma?”

She rolls her eyes, wishing for a brief moment that it would get on to the actual torture part rather than proceed with these inane questions. “Nine months. Now what is the point of-”

This time she cuts herself off. The math. The simple, elementary math. She never did it before.

How did she never do it before?

She only realizes her hands have fallen limply to her sides when its move to cup her jaw, forcing her to meet its eyes. 

“I am sorry,” it says, “for how long it has taken me to reach you again.”

She tries to pull away, but it won’t let her, holding her fast with that same gentleness. She wishes it were cruel.

“We fought,” it says, brushing her hair from her face. “Over some middling thing. You were ungrateful, and it has been too long since I had cause to unleash my wrath. I meant to leave you only a week or two, long enough you would realize the error of your ways. But you excelled. You found water, food.” It smiles proudly. “I admit, I wanted to see how far you would go alone.”

“Stop talking,” she says softly. It’s all she can manage.

“But then Will-”

“Now!” she yells, wrenching out of his hold. She falls to the bed and is instantly aware of the picture she must make. Still disheveled from the crash, lying in a mess of wine red sheets.  _Its_  sheets, she imagines. “You’re lying. And I won’t listen to any more of it. I don’t know what games you think you’re playing with me but they won’t work.” She was alone on a planet with no sun for nine months, it’s only logical her perception of time was skewed. In fact it’s far more logical than believing she was with this thing for any amount of that time.

She’s grateful suddenly that it’s Ward’s face it wears. If it was anyone else’s, she might feel sorry for it with the expression it has on now.

“We were in love,” it says dully.

She tries to move away as it climbs onto the bed with her, but it’s too quick, catching her head between its hands and holding her fast. 

“And you will remember,” it promises. “I only buried the memories, I would never remove them entirely.” 

She opens her mouth to tell it to bugger off, but what comes out is a moan of pain as she feels the pressure of its touch beneath her skull.

“I am sorry too,” it says, “for the pain. You will understand once it passes.”

She will  _hate_  him once it passes, but that thought barely forms in her mind before it’s gone, chased away by the agony of his power pressing down on her. She curls into him because there’s nowhere else to go, her entire body struggling to find some shelter from the pain. Her fingers dig so deep into the skin of his arms and hands that she draws blood and she cries like a wounded animal. 

All the while he shushes her, promising this is for the best, it will not last long, she’ll thank him once it’s done.

 


	29. escape attempt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jemma was so close to escape

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: baby

Jemma’s foot slips on the next rung and sharp fear runs through her. Memories of falling spring up, threatening to drown her. And then strong hands close around her hips and the relief of their support has her releasing her death grip on the metal bar before she hears the man holding her speak.

“Don’t worry. I’ve got you, baby.”

The fear was far better than the ice that freezes her veins now. She was wrong: it isn’t a man, it’s the  _thing_  that came through the monolith wearing Ward’s face. The very same creature she was hoping to make her escape from while all its agents have been thrown into a tizzy over … something. She didn’t wait to find out what, only ran. 

Unfortunately a very limited familiarity with the base they’re in worked against her and now she’s been caught.

She twists, attempting to extract herself from its hold while turning to see it. Its eyes are shut, its mouth drawn down in a severe frown.

“My apologies,” it says, but it doesn’t let her go. If anything it tightens its hold while opening its eyes to face her. “Your Coulson has finally devised a weapon capable of injuring me. I’m afraid its effects haven’t fully worn off.”

She wants very much to take comfort in that. The team’s managed to hurt it (she’s been here  _weeks_  and the most she’s managed to do is momentarily inconvenience it). But it doesn’t look injured and it has no trouble at all tugging her into its side and pulling her back towards her quarters.

“The team,” she says, “are they-”

“Fine.” Its fingers dig into her hip, reminding her that it hasn’t let up the contact. It’s been tactile with her before, seemed to take great pleasure in touching and holding and examining her when it first arrived, all of which she later attributed to a combination of its access to Ward’s memories of her and, when she learned what was on the other side of the monolith, its long isolation. But that was weeks ago. What kind of a weapon could cause such a change in it? “I spared them all. For you.”

Her theorizing over the weapon and its effects halts at the reminder. It claims it has no plans to harm the others, that Ward’s supposedly fond memories are enough to spare them its wrath. But if they keep working against its plans, it might be forced to do things it would rather not.

Which is where Jemma comes in. It will go out of its way to avoid harming them - even when they openly attack - so long as she keeps working with the crystals HYDRA stole from Afterlife.

It stops outside her door and the guard stationed there steps aside while respectfully dropping his eyes. The move, one she sees every day, seems frighteningly pointed when the creature turns her so that it can touch her cheek. “You will not disappoint me, will you, Jemma?”

It says her name precisely as Ward did in shadowed corners of the Bus when she flirted pathetically. Before his death, she hated Ward for a lot of things, those stolen moments among them, but if she hated him, she hates this thing even more for stealing those moments.

“No,” she says stiffly, the only acceptable answer. “No, I won’t.”

Its knuckles run along her cheek and it tips its head, its focus drifting somewhere far away. “We knew we could count on you,” it says. Her blood boils, it only uses  _we_ when it’s including people it’s stolen in the past; it has no right to Ward’s trust in her abilities. None.

And even less right to cup her face in its hands and bend to kiss her forehead. “Goodnight, Jemma. And do not try to leave me again.” The warning comes with a cold buzz that sinks into her bones as she’s sent stumbling into her quarters.

She curses once she’s alone. Now, while it’s still incapacitated from the team’s attack, is the time to make another attempt at escape, no matter how hasty, but she can’t. The pressure of that order will last a day, maybe two, preventing her from even thinking about leaving for more than a few seconds together. By the time it wears off, the monster will be well, and she’ll be as trapped as ever.

She can only hope the team’s next attack does more damage.

 


	30. when I said I loved you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After weeks trapped by Hive, Jemma is finally safe in the Playground.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "When I said I loved you, I meant it."

Jemma rolls over in bed and instantly regrets it. She’s not in pain, as she wasn’t harmed - physically - but the sedatives Lincoln prescribed have left her in a hazy, half-asleep state where any change is enough to jerk her forcefully out of true rest. 

She ignores the sound of an agent’s phone ringing in the hall and remains perfectly still, allowing the drugs to do their work and pull her back under.

She’s safe, here in her own bed in the Playground. Daisy, rescued only days before she was, is detoxing down on the containment level. Radcliffe is being held in hopes he’ll be able to cure those men his formula transformed. And Hive…

He’s not a threat. The suspension the ATCU devised for holding more destructive Inhumans is keeping him prisoner. And Coulson promised hell be buried somewhere no one will ever find him.

She’s safe.

But her subconscious is not so easily convinced. It wants to replay the fears of the last few weeks in order to work through those traumas while she sleeps. She experienced a similar effect after returning from Maveth. So it’s really no surprise that while she slips into that cloudy, inbetween state, her mind superimposes a nightmare on the blueprint of her present surroundings.

It provides her with an image of Hive opening her door, his haughty gaze gentling when it falls on her. He closes them in together and seems to fill up the space with his mere presence.

She turns her face into the pillow in an effort to dispel the image. “Go away,” she murmurs.

But her subconscious doesn’t listen. It allows the image to rest a heavy hand on her head and the fearful drumming of her heart eases, just as it always does when he truly touches her. He lowers himself so they’re at more or less eye-level, studying her face while his hand makes steady strokes over her hair. “What have they done to you?” he asks.

“Sedative,” she says, too tired to bother with the full sentence when the one word is already a mouthful. 

He hums deep in his throat. Soft, uncallused fingers trace the curve of her jaw. She sighs in contentment. She may be in the middle of a nightmare, but it comes with all the real pleasures of having her soulmate present.

This is why he’s dangerous. Obviously his powers and his megalomaniacal plans play a roll, but none of those have an effect on her. As she learned in her weeks of captivity, he won’t harm her or even threaten her. He doesn’t have to. Nature has provided him with much crueler weapons.

He bends forward to press a light kiss to her forehead and the sensation reaches deep down to her core. “I won’t let them take you from me again,” he promises.

“Why?” she asks. Why is it possible to turn the bond into an instrument of torture? Why is she bound to him of all people? Why not Fitz or Will or Trip or even Ward? And why is her subconscious tormenting her with what she’ll never have again?

He brushes his fingers through her hair. “When I said I loved you, I meant it. I waited lifetimes for you, my Jemma. I would never allow any harm to come to you, even from those you consider friends.”

He’s claimed to love her before, that he loved her from afar on Maveth when he didn’t yet know who she was to him and has, since his release from that prison, plotted to bring them together with all the same fervor with which he planned his new world order. And just as she did on those other occasions, she wants to believe he’s wrong, that a monster like him is incapable of love. It would make it easier to resist the steady pull of the soul bond in her veins. But she can’t. 

“Sleep now,” he says while he lifts her into his arms so that he might cradle her to his chest. “You won’t want to see what’s ahead, but I promise we’ll have left it far behind by the time you awaken.”

The drug and the soothing nature of his presence come over her like a wave. She has just enough to sense to nestle herself more comfortably against him, wrapping one hand around the buttons of his jacket so that she can keep steady, and no sense at all to wonder how, if she’s already dreaming, she can be falling asleep in his arms.

 


	31. are you insane

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It takes a great deal to surprise Hive, but Jemma manages.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "Are you fucking insane?" from lillysbitchfest over on tumblr
> 
> Content warning in the end note.

“We’re not sure what happened,” the man at the console says. He is nervous, uncomfortable to be in Hive’s presence. It is understandable.

“Show me,” Hive says, bending over him to better see the screen. It flickers to life on an image of Jemma’s cell, timestamped more than an hour prior. She’s on the floor, curled up in such a way he can easily imagine her moans of agony.

They know this story, have first-hand experience with it. Hive almost feels sympathy for the guard who kneels at her side. But only almost because where Will had fourteen years of isolation to explain his foolishness, the guard has only his own idiocy. He deserves the headache.

But he does not, as it turns out, receive it because after she’s rendered him unconscious and stripped him of his weapons, Jemma makes no move to flee. She examines the blade on the guard’s knife and then, with a stroke so swift it speaks of her knowledge of human anatomy, ends his life. And then she…

Hive tips his head to one side. “What is she doing now?”

He hears the gulp from the man beside him. “The same.” A tap at the keyboard brings up the live feed. The man has to look away. 

“And the door is still open,” Hive muses. No one responds, as it’s plain to see on the screen that it is. “I think it’s time I spoke with her.” He sweeps from the room without another word. He had planned on allowing Jemma space to stew for a few days. It would not wear down her defenses - isolation could hardly do that after her months on Maveth - but it would irritate her, perhaps to the point of giving away more than she should when the time came. But now, with this odd development, he has no patience for drawing things out.

It’s so unlike her. Neither Will nor Grant knows what to make of it and Hive himself is at a loss. The only reasonable explanation he can summon up for her behavior is that, after less than thirty-six hours of captivity, she has lost her mind. And as that is highly unlikely - if he couldn’t drive her to madness on Maveth, nothing can - he requires an explanation from Jemma herself.

No one stops him on his way down to the detention level, no one would dare, though he thinks perhaps the guards huddled at the end of her hall consider it. They are all pale and shaken, as well they should be. Hive leaves them in his wake.

Jemma appears just as she did on the security feed: sitting cross-legged beside the dead guard’s corpse, knife held delicately in one hand like a scalpel while she works. He knows that look of concentration she wears. Will saw it for months while she calculated their return journey. Grant saw it adopted over everything from autopsies to sandwich construction.

“Jemma,” he says gently. 

Her eyes snap up to meet his. The same blood that pools on the floor and stains the fingers of her free hand has colored her frowning lips. “Oh, it’s you.”

He chuckles and steps forward to kneel on the other side of the corpse while she resumes her work. “Yes, it’s me. You’ve scared everyone else off.”

She makes a noise that is meant to imply she’s too distracted to listen, but they know her better than that. Still, he is content to watch for several moments before asking what he came here to.

“What has happened to you, Jemma?”

This time the noise she makes is most definitely a scoff, and an annoyed one at that. She smiles angrily at him. “The  _Kree_  happened to me.”

Rage - sharp as a blade and strong as an ocean current - sweeps over him. But he reminds himself of the heart resting beside his bed, the taste of Kree flesh on his tongue, and the final gasping breath before he allowed it to fall to the ground. It was only one Kree and there are surely still others, but as far as closure goes, it was a decent start.

But if one of them touched Jemma, lover to one host, friend and enemy to another… He should not have made the death so easy.

“You thought you could summon reapers from the edge of the solar system and no one would notice?” she goes on. “More came.” She sits back against the narrow cot and looks over his head at a memory he wishes he could prevent her seeing. “They offered to help.”

“How?” he asks softly.

Her smile is no longer cruel, but neither is it pleasant. “They said they needed a potential Inhuman; Coulson refused.”

“Naturally.” Coulson might be absurdly trusting of aliens, but he isn’t a fool. He would never hand over an innocent to be experimented on.

“But we needed their help, needed to stop  _you_ -” the accusation is weak and nothing at all to what she says next- “and they still knew how to make Inhumans from regular human beings, so I offered an alternative.”

The rage swells again. “ _Are you insane?_ ” he demands, unaware he means to stand until he’s looming over her. “You offered yourself up to those butchers?” Doesn’t she know that she belongs to him? Has been his since the first moment she breathed Maveth’s air? How could she blaspheme against him by returning to the old gods he’s sworn to tear from their high places? How could she condemn herself to  _that_?

“They said they would find a way to stop you,” she says, not in the least impressed by his fury.

He stills. He is not fearful, but he knows it is best to be cautious. This is the same woman who murdered Bakshi, who feigned illness not once but twice to attack her captor. It would be just like her to walk her weapon right into his stronghold. “And did they?”

She considers him for a moment, that genius brain of hers spinning away. “Let’s find out,” she says. Then, faster than he can track, she turns the knife over and slices her arm.

He moves forward, a faint sound escaping him without his consent, but there’s no cause for him to worry. While he watches, the unnaturally slow oozing of her blood slows, then ceases altogether as the wound heals over.

She tips her chin up in what is plainly a challenge. “Sway me.”

He likely shouldn’t. Didn’t she just say the Kree changed her to use against him? But this is Jemma, offering herself to him, and all the common sense in the world is not enough that he can resist.

He reaches out, allows himself to come undone that he might make her a part of his whole. And when it’s finished, when he looks on her as one of his own people, he sees…

“I hate you,” she says with barely any vitriol at all. She smiles. “Guess it worked.”

She is not part of his collective. How is this possible? “I cannot help you,” he says, kneeling at her side this time. 

She goes back to work on the corpse, unconcerned that he watches. “They’ve made new terragen crystals. Any Inhuman using them to transition will be immune to your powers.”

He waits until she’s swallowed to point out the flaw in that plan. “There are already many Inhumans who have transitioned with the old crystals. What do the Kree have planned for them?”

She meets his eyes steadily and the hate he sees in them is not at all meant for him. “Why do you think I let your men capture me?”

He smiles. That he cannot sway her is a blow, he will not deny that, but Jemma has willingly come to him, sought out his help. In seeking to defeat him, she has only made herself more his than she ever was. It is a promising development.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for cannibalism


	32. ouat fusion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hive/Jemma as Rumple/Belle from Once Upon A Time

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "kiss me"

“Kiss me,” he says. There’s no seduction in his tone, just that odd combination of his typical superiority and the gentleness he adds just for her. His hands though, those are on her hips, and their chests brush with every breath she draws in. 

She wants to ask him many things, not the least being her constant question of whether tonight really was a date. It certainly seems to have been. He reserved the entirety of Granny’s diner to ensure their privacy and had a selection of low-cut dresses sent over for her perusal beforehand. And now, after a moonlit walk through town, he has her pressed against the bricks of the alley behind the library like they’re a couple of teenagers too eager to bother getting back to their car.

But despite all the evidence that he has, in fact, asked for what she thinks, what escapes her is a simple, confused, “What?”

He smiles that same smile that never fails to make her heart melt. Not the first time, when he had just, essentially, bought her in exchange for her people’s lives. Not in the following months as loneliness and proximity saw her falling steadily under his beastly spell. Not even here and now, in this stark and magicless world he’s cursed her and countless others to.

“Kiss me,” he says again while bending his head closer to hers. With the dim light behind him, she can only see the edges of that sharp smile.

She should be frightened. She’s in a dark alley with the beast.

She touches his cheek and leans up on her toes to do as he’s asked. She’s not afraid of him, hasn’t been in years. There’s more to him than his crimes and regardless of what her friends might say, she can see the man beneath the monster. Isn’t tonight proof that he can be more? Is trying to be?

She pulls him closer, pouring all her love and hope for him into this first kiss. He holds one hand at the back of her head, massaging her scalp and cushioning her from the hard stone at once. 

The kiss breaks, leaving her breathless. He doesn’t follow it up with another, only thumbs her cheek and waits patiently for her to regain her senses. She thinks it might be promising that his other hand remains curled around her hip, hinting at more while his expression, as ever, remains frustratingly aloof.

“Nothing,” he says once her lungs have stopped heaving. Ice crackles along her veins and not even the gentle play of his fingers in her hair can warm her. “I am still as I have always been,” he goes on. “In a land without magic, love has no power to strip me of my glory.”

 _She_  has no power, he means. Her weight settles against the wall. It saps her of what little warmth is left in her.

She wants to defend herself from the implicit accusation that she would attempt to harm him. There was a time, perhaps, when she might have, but that was long ago and worlds away. 

Here? In this place where everyone fears and hates him for what he’s done? She would  _never_.

But she can’t make the words come. Not when she’s certain even a gentle breeze would see her cracked heart breaking to pieces.

“Now you know,” he says. “And you need no longer hope for what will not be.” His hand finds hers and she feels herself pulled against his side. They resume their meandering moonlit walk.

 


	33. can I touch you?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "Can I touch you?"

There is only one thing important enough he would exert the effort to speak while his body is in such a state. All it takes is one word and she is brought before him, pale and shaking. Not visibly, of course; his Jemma is too proud for that, but he recognizes it in the way she twists her hands.

She stares openly and, though she does not speak, he can see her searching for signs of him behind the face she once knew so well. He is tempted to move beneath the surface, allow her to see him as Gideon did, but it has been days since then and he has settled too deeply to do so without damaging this body beyond use.

Gideon is speaking, recounting the story of his homecoming yet again, this time with emphasis on her. Her capture. SHIELD’s attempts at rescue. They failed - obviously - and he cares for nothing beyond that.

She must not either because she finally breaks the stand-off (figurative stand-off, as he hasn’t even managed to sit up fully in bed) between them by climbing onto the mattress. It barely shifts beneath her weight as she shuffles over on her knees. Gideon makes a move as if to stop her, but Hive lifts a hand - not to ward him off, he is not nearly so important as to warrant that, but to encourage Jemma closer.

She hesitates, just out of his reach. Her wide, penetrating eyes move from his lifted hand to his ruined chest and finally to his face. “Can- can I touch you?” she asks.

He smiles indulgently and nods. It takes some coaxing (and he could kill Coulson for damaging this body so; with speech still so difficult, he dares not attempt it while she can hear lest he give her further cause to worry) but soon she is resting in his arms, head carefully arranged on his shoulder so as to avoid the ribs. 

Soon she will not be so fearful of damaging him. She still sees him as that lonely, broken creature she met on Maveth. But in time she will see him as he truly is: a god returned to save this world.

But that is still a ways off. First, before anything else, he must repair this body. For now, however, he simply enjoys the warmth of her and the feeling that, for the first time since she was stolen away from him, he is once more whole.

 


	34. sun

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jemma wakes up warm in the Framework.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "sun" for Ward!Hive/Jemma

The cozy warmth that greets Jemma in the Framework is a far cry from the chill of the quinjet. Further still is the pleasant hum just beneath her skin from the ache that has settled, over the last few hours, into every muscle and every corner of her heart. For a moment, she allows herself to enjoy the illusion of the firm mattress, soft sheets, and warm arms around her.

A buzz sounds, breaking through the cloud of comfort that cushions her from reality. Her companion must feel similarly irritated because at the same time that a door opens in the direction the buzz came from, he shifts to press his forehead to her shoulder. A note of annoyance escapes him and  _that_ is her first indication - though it shouldn’t have been, how could she not have noticed before? - that he isn’t Fitz.

He sits up, and she rolls over, careful to hold the sheet to her chest as she rises as well because, computer construct or no, there’s no one else she wants seeing her naked. 

Her heart stops. She can feel it pounding beneath her hand but it must stop entirely because her chest feels curiously hollow. The man sitting beside her is practically radiating annoyance, though that isn’t what fills her with fear. It’s the weight of his very presence. She thought she’d felt the last of it when that quinjet exploded.

If she ever sees Radcliffe again, she’ll be sure to express to him precisely how grateful she is to be feeling it again. Possibly with a slow-acting poison.

“I was told I would have until tomorrow,” Hive says testily. For all he sounds furious, beneath the blankets his hand slides languidly up and down her calf. There’s a familiarity there that terrifies her even as his touch leaves pleasant goosebumps wherever it strays.

“Circumstances change,” May -  _May?_  - says. She’s standing in front of a very heavy door with an armed guard at her back. She’s also, to Jemma’s steadily increasing horror, wearing a skull and tentacles logo on her shoulder.

“No,” she breathes.

Hive’s hand tightens almost painfully above her ankle, drawing her attention back to him.

“You’re needed now,” May goes on. Her voice is cold, dripping disdain. There’s not a hint of the respect Jemma might expect, given that she’s clearly HYDRA. 

Despite knowing May is her friend and the only other real person in this room, Jemma finds herself drawing closer to Hive at her tone. May’s eyes slide to her; the disgust in them doubles. 

“You can get back to playing with your food when you’re done.”

The annoyance Jemma feels coming off him flares and then all at once dissipates. Hive twists and catches her face in his hands, forcing her to focus on him. “This won’t take long,” he promises. He leans forward, not to kiss her on the lips, but to kiss lightly along her jaw until his teeth tug at her earlobe, sending a shiver of pure want to her core. The rush of it is almost enough to drown out his voice, so quiet it would be an exaggeration to call it a whisper. “I will have you in the sun again soon.”

“Hive!” May snaps.

He leaves her. Unsteady and wanting she may be, but she still has eyes and ears. She sees the half-dozen guards in addition to May, all of whom seem more concerned with containing Hive than protecting him. She sees the heavy door shut with her on the wrong side of it. And she hears the lock, heavy as the door it’s attached to, slide into place once she’s alone. Slowly, she sinks back onto the bed and, from her back, sees the security cameras as well.

She closes her eyes. Just what the bloody hell is going on in this nightmare of Radcliffe’s?

 


	35. headache

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hive recovers from the memory machine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written for a first sentence prompt from capriciouswrites

He’s starting to get used to the headache behind his eyes, and the intensity of the memories is fading. He’s nearly himself again. He can return his focus to the mission, the salvation of the human race.

There is a sigh, faint and feminine. It falls lightly over his bare chest, and Jemma rolls deeper into his embrace.

With the fading of the pain that came from Coulson’s memory machine-turned-weapon, goes the memories of what occurred while the remnants of his former hosts took control. As such, he cannot clearly remember how he and she came to be here, what Will - or perhaps Grant or yet another - said to entice her into not only his arms but his bed. 

She did not come easily, he knows that much, but she did come. Eventually even her hatred of him was not enough to overcome her broken heart. 

He runs a hand up her spine, enjoying the way her grip on him tightens in response. She fits even better against this host than she did the last and he is loathe to end that.

He  _can_  return to the mission, but he will remain here a while longer. It would be rude to abandon her while she sleeps, and he’s eager to see how she will receive him when she awakens.

 


	36. through your teeth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Season 2 AU

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: things you said through your teeth

The sudden shift from bright sunlight to the dim backseat of the town car momentarily costs her her vision. Blindly, she allows herself to be pulled down into a seat making room for Bakshi behind her, and hears more than sees him take the seat ahead of her.

“That could have gone better,” he says. He sounds moderately ruffled, but as Jemma’s vision clears, she can see no sign of it. He taps the glass behind him, urging the driver to get them moving now that everyone valuable is on board. 

Hive, who dragged her inside behind him, is even less flustered than Bakshi. He pays no mind to the sounds of chaos they leave behind, only reaches out calmly along the seatback to play with the hair that came loose from her tie during their escape. 

There was a time when the casual contact would have frightened her, when being the favorite of the Gifted who’s taken control of HYDRA in the wake of the uprising would have set her heart to racing, but now the gentle brush of his knuckles against her skull serves to lower her frantic pulse. Familiarity has bred a terrible sort of comfort, one she can’t - or perhaps won’t - break herself of feeling.

If Bakshi even notices the attention, he gives no sign that he cares. “We’ll need to deal with SHIELD if the plans for the terrigen crystals are to move forward.”

Jemma’s heart leaps into her throat, and she uses the pretext of leaning into Hive’s touch to face him. He hums, considering, his thoughts as closed off to her as ever. She tells herself that his favor gives her greater insight into what HYDRA does - and it’s true, she never even would've heard of the terrigen crystals were it not for the time she spends with him - but it’s given her no insight at all into  _him_.

“SHIELD will be dealt with,” he agrees, and she hopes the tunnel they’ve just entered hides the worst of her blanching, “in time. The dissemination will have to carry on despite their intrusions.”

Jemma’s muscles relax in relief, and she can only hope the others assume it’s relief they’re safely away. No retaliation against SHIELD means the team is safe for a while longer. 

“Of course,” Bakshi agrees respectfully while his mouth pulls down in annoyance. He pulls his phone from his jacket and begins what Jemma assumes are arrangements to move the project to another location.

She tries to pay attention, but while Hive and Coulson are preoccupied with the crystals, she has other concerns. She’s told Coulson repeatedly that he needs to find a way to stop Hive; she’s only ever seen a fraction of his power and she knows there’s little to stop him decimating SHIELD should he get it in his head to. Why he doesn’t, she can’t begin to guess anymore than she can why he’s taken a liking to her.

It’s not sexual, no matter what the rumor mill might say to the contrary. She thought it was, at first, with the way he looked at and touched her, but it’s never gone beyond this, this steady, almost idle contact. In her darker moments, she thinks she’s something of a pet to him, something pretty he likes to have at his side simply to prove he can.

And he’s right, damn him. Not because he has the power to keep her, but because she has, over the weeks since his tour of the labs first brought her into his notice, fallen in love with him. It’s the only explanation for the way his simple touch and presence affects her. Weeks of pretending to be infatuated for the sake of her cover have resulted in genuine emotion.

She has to tell Coulson. Not about her feelings, but about the continued plans for the crystals and, again, about how dangerous Hive is. Perhaps he’ll listen this time, and she can finally end this assignment and shake off these feelings she’s developed-

A sharp pain erupts in her skull, so intense she doubles up under the pressure of it.

Bakshi makes a sound of distress, but it’s Hive’s “Jemma?” that snaps her focus out of herself and back to the world around her. “Are you injured?” His hand slides up and down her back as if searching for an unnoticed wound.

“No,” she says through the pain, which is already decreasing under his touch. “No, just my head…”

He pulls her up so that he can look into her face. The warmth of his broad hands seeps into her skin, and his thumbs sweep over her cheeks. Slowly, he smiles. “You’re all right,” he says and bends to kiss her forehead.

Her heart does a back flip in her chest as he pulls her into his side, settling them both once more. Bakshi appears on the edge of true concern, but if Hive is content to let it go, so is he. Jemma closes her eyes on him and nuzzles deeper into Hive’s embrace. He makes no complaint, and she allows herself, for the duration of the ride, to simply enjoy being held by the man she loves.

 


	37. cold

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's a body in the desert.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: "cold" from lillysbitchfest

The silence has held for a count of three hundred when Jemma finally dares to make her way over the ridge. She can’t begin to suspect what happened here - gunshots and voices are promising, but she long ago learned not to trust them on this world, especially not when the wind kicks up - and is prepared to find more of the same she has in every inch of this desert: sand and nothingness.

She isn’t prepared for the body.

She hesitates, working through her mental checklist. There’s no wind. She hasn’t bled within the last twenty-four hours. And there’s no portal she can see. Which means this just might be real.

The entire way down the slope of the hill, she tells herself it’s a stand of rocks that just happens to  _look_ like a body. But as she circles closer and closer, there’s no angle at which it looks like anything else. In fact, when she’s near enough, she can make out hair and fabric.

It’s only when she’s right on top of it that she hesitates, recognizing the face. But even her fear isn’t enough to send her running, not here, not when he’s the first human being she’s seen in more than a year. The cuffs holding his wrists are solid beneath her fingers. His camo gear is real. His skin is … is ice cold.

“ _No_ ,” she breathes. She feels for a pulse, but she’s shaking so badly there’s no way she can tell for sure there isn’t one. 

She adjusts his neck on the sand, opens his mouth, and breathes a strong puff of air into his lungs.

“You are  _not_  dying on me, Ward,” she says, positioning her hands over his chest to begin compressions. “Do you hear me? You are not-”

_CRACK!_

Jemma leaps back. Splayed in the sand, weight resting on her hands behind her, she’s helpless to do more than watch as slowly the body lifts, rolling onto its side. Towards her.

She can’t move.

Those eyes she once thought she knew so well open. She doesn’t know them at all.

Even at this distance, she can hear the chest creak and rattle as It drags in a breath. “Jemma.”

“Don’t come near me,” she says, spurred suddenly into action. Her feet kick at the sand and she makes to run, but It catches her ankle before she can stand.

She fights. She kicks and claws and struggles, but Ward has always been stronger than her. It seems being possessed by some alien creature doesn’t change that fact.

She bites back sobs as Ward’s weight settles over her. She won’t let It make her cry.

Cold fingers rest against the sensitive skin of her throat. The metal of the cuffs chills her jaw. Equally icy fingers brush her hair from her face. “I will not,” It says, voice tight with exertion, “hurt you.” 

A laugh chokes her. The monster that’s been hunting her for a year wants her to believe it  _won’t_  hurt her. 

At least, she thinks, she got to see sunshine one last time. It was months ago but she still holds the memory of it close to her heart, has dreams where it lasts hours instead of seconds. It was the best day, the final good moment of her life, and she clings to it in what are sure to be her final moments.

A blissful smile, wholly unlike Ward at even his most disturbing, tugs at Its lips and Its eyes flutter. The warmth ekes out of her and, at the same time, Its smile fades. 

It’s in her  _head_.

“Get  _out_ ,” she demands, squirming beneath It.

She feels the misshapen chest expand against her own, all jagged points and hard planes. She wonders if that’s how It got in. Did It burrow its way into Ward’s chest? Is It going to do the same to her? Will it hurt?

“No,” It says. “You are mine. I will take care of you.”

She doesn’t know what that means, but she won’t be this thing’s prisoner. She uses all her strength to push at the same spot she attempted to perform chest compressions before. As she’d hoped, the bones and muscle are sufficiently damaged that she does It real harm. Its eyes bulge and It sways sideways, not completely off her, but far enough she has hopes of wriggling free.

She throws her arms out, dragging at the sand, hunting for a rock to give her much needed leverage while It still struggles to breathe. One of her hands lands on something too smooth to be a desert rock, but small enough to lift and plenty heavy enough to send It reeling when she slams it against the side of Its head. 

Free, she runs. First to put distance between them, then to the safety of caves hidden deep inside the hills. It’s only there, with her lungs burning and her muscles tingling with exhaustion, that she finally looks at what she holds in her hand: a  _hand_. A very advanced prosthetic.

She sinks to the dusty cavern floor. It takes only a glance at the exposed mechanics of the arm end for her to recognize Fitz’s handiwork. 

It wasn’t just Ward. Coulson was here too.

For the first time since the sun set, hope swells in her chest.

 


	38. nuzzling

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jemma makes a last stand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: (creepy) nuzzling from thestarfishdancer

“Stay away from me!” Jemma demands. Hive is no more deterred now than he was the last time she spoke those words. He smirks at her in a way that strikes her as more sinister than Ward ever was and continues stalking closer.

She curses her choice of rooms in which to make her last stand. Had she been just a little faster, she would have made it to the lounge, where there is a kitchen and knives and pots and pans, all excellent for throwing. Here there are only boxes of toner, all of which are far too ungainly for defense. The narrow closet offers her little room as well, and he’s invading her space before she can wonder if hurling a box at him anyway wouldn’t be worth it. His hands wrap around the edge of the shelf behind her while he bends his head. His breath falls over her neck, thick and warm from his conquest of the base. 

“Oh, Jemma,” he sighs, and his forehead drops to her shoulder. Her back digs into the shelf he holds and she gasps in a breath as he begins nuzzling at her neck in a way that puts her in mind of a predator trying to decide which is the right spot to tear into the throat. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

If it’s possible to be more frightened when the monster from your nightmares is already quite literally on top of you, Jemma certainly proves it then. She had hoped he might not be able to tell or at the least that their previous encounters would blind him to the change.

Still, she has to hope, and makes an effort at a bluff. “That I hate you? I thought that would be obvious.”

He chuckles and, with the way he’s pressed against her, the sound vibrates through her entire body. His warm breath puffs over skin his touch has left overly sensitive.

“Oh no,” one of his hands digs into her hair, holding her on the other side so that she can’t even turn her face away. “Not that. That you’re mine.”

Damn. So much for hope. (Doom, he called himself when last they met. How right he was.)

It was her experiments with the Primitives’ DNA that did it. She was working on a cure for them and was exposed to one of the blood samples upon which she’d tested a formula which proved a failure. At curing Inhumans, not at creating them, as it turned out.

She hasn’t told anyone at all yet for fear if anyone were captured, Hive might discover what she’d done. The answer to his quest, and she has it flowing in her veins and jangling about in her head.

There’s little time to mourn the lives that will be lost or enslaved or the world that will be forever altered due to her mistake. She can feel the force of Hive’s power passing through her skin like a hurricane, so forceful it’s no wonder it tears flesh from bone. But rather than kill her, it burrows into her, sliding along her veins until it reaches her brain. And once there, it does its work.

She relaxes as the fear leaves her. Her hands release their death grip on the shelves and wrap around him instead. She presses closer to him, breathing in the scent of him, and he readily wraps his arms around her in return. She sighs, content for the moment to wallow in the peace he’s given her, the peace he will soon give the whole world. 

 


	39. head in lap

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hive awakens in the dark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prompt: head in lap

Elegant fingers curl through his hair, dragging along his scalp in a soothing motion that makes waking difficult. He has to fight through the lull of sleep and it is only the sudden memory of his last moments of consciousness - he faced SHIELD after their foiling of his plans for the warhead, but their efforts to imprison him would only bring him closer to his ultimate goal - that brings him fully awake.

His eyes snap open. The hand falls away and the thighs cushioning his head tense.

“Jemma?” he asks, shock forcing the word from him in Will’s voice.

There is a storm in her eyes, emotions so at odds he cannot begin to categorize them properly, but she says only a dry, “Welcome back.”

He sits up. Pain lightnings down his spine and through his muscles. The memory machine’s effects still linger. 

“Just keep breathing,” Jemma says. One of her hands slides over his back, easing the pain, and her warmth seeps into his side as she presses herself against him in an offer of support.

This place is all stone and cement and shadow. There are none of the stark lights or watchful cameras he expected of SHIELD’s prisons, only a handful of light sticks that appear to have been hastily strewn about the space. However, they are not alone: one of his children hovers in a far corner, crouched near the floor like an uncertain rat.

“Where are we?” he asks. He faces her. “What have you done?” She is dangerous. Grant and Will both knew that, albeit in different ways. And as the only sacrifice who ever managed to track the portal’s opening, Hive knows better than to underestimate her.

“We’re in an old SSR facility.” Her voice is even enough, but he can see worry edging in at the corners of her eyes. “I woke you up.”

The twisted remains of the cage they had him in lie behind her; he missed it before due to the pervasive darkness.

“Why?”

He nearly snatches her hand out of the air when it leaves his back, but she doesn’t try to escape his reach. She only fists her hands on her knees and readies herself to speak. While she does so, he notices something else he missed in these shadows. He takes her chin in hand and turns her head so the faint light catches her cheek. 

A scar runs from her temple to the hinge of her jaw. It is not new.

“You’ve been asleep for nearly two years.”

His hand falls. His lungs work slowly, painfully. He has spent eons imprisoned, but at least in them he  _lived_. To have lost two full years to nothing but darkness…

“Why?” he asks again and trusts her to recognize what he means in the hardness of his tone.

She drags in an breath, slow and uncertain. “Earth has been invaded. By aliens. The Avengers are still too fractured to mount an attack, assuming they even could. SHIELD’s gone. It was infiltrated and it was-” she looks to the shadows- “it was worse than the uprising.”

A wicked sort of satisfaction eases the pain of years lost in nothingness. “You need me to stop them.”

She faces him, defiance written in every inch of her. Not, he thinks, towards him. They are in an isolated base, with only one of his children for company. SHIELD, as she said, is gone. She did not revive him under orders or even with permission. This was her decision and hers alone. If any of her friends still live and know of her plans, they cannot be pleased.

“You ruled that  _entire planet_ ,” she says, almost as an accusation. “And maybe you can’t do that here without making Earth uninhabitable too, but you’ll at least be able to tell us which Inhumans are  _real_ and which are impostors. That’s more than we have now.”

The words she leaves unsaid - that he can tell his people from impostors so perfect she herself cannot only by swaying them - seem to lurk in the surrounding shadows. What horrors could drive her to such an extreme?

“You are desperate.”

Even in the dim light, her eyes flash. “This is about more than grudges and hurt feelings-” whatever her words, her cracking voice says differently- “this is about the fate of the  _Earth_. You can’t tell me you’re just going to let these invaders take it?” She’s afraid. Of him. Of the enemy she hasn’t yet named. But most of all, of his answer.

He eases his hand into her hair, covering the scar with the heel of his palm. “Jemma,” he says in a tone that steals her breath, “you need only ask.”

Her face seems to crumple in a furious kind of despair. She hates him. In a personal, private way she previously reserved only for Grant Ward. It must be killing her to have come to him - to have released him - even for so valuable a prize.

“Will you help us?” she asks, voice thin with the effort it takes to ask anything at all of him. He holds her eyes a moment more, patiently waiting. “ _Please_.”

He smiles and leans forward to kiss her forehead in a way he knows she will find familiar. A breath almost like a sob catches in her throat.

“Of course, Jemma,” he says over the sound. He pulls them both to their feet. “So long as you serve me, you will have whatever your heart desires.”

There’s an argument on her tongue - she thinks she can make deals with him and offer nothing of herself in return; for all her genius she is as naïve as HYDRA - but he stalls it by tugging her after him. His child rushes ahead of them, scouting the way to be certain it is clear of threats.

Arguments must wait until this world is as it was always meant to be: his.

 


	40. cult

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jemma's headache lingers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I haven't updated this collection in FOREVER but hopefully posting this got-out-of-control drabble directly to it will shame me into transferring the rest of my tumblr drabbles over pretty soon. For now though, I hope you enjoy this, which is the result of an anon prompting "cult" for my halloween-y prompt meme.

Jemma screws her eyes shut against the persistent sunlight even as she forces herself to sit up. Her head aches, and first thing in the morning too. She’ll be nursing this all day.

Around her, the others are beginning to rouse. She hears bed springs creak and cloth shuffle against cloth and the gentle sounds of half-conscious morning greetings.

“Morning, Jemma,” Eden says, dropping down from the bunk above hers.

It’s safer now, with Eden blocking the window, to open her eyes. “Morning,” she says, forcing a weak smile. It’s sadly ruined by a yawn.

Eden giggles, the sound like the windchimes outside. “Sleep well?” she asks wryly.

“I slept fine.” She suffered strange dreams perhaps but she can’t even remember them now, she’s only left with a lingering feeling of disquiet. She frowns. “But I feel like there’s something I should be doing.” She can’t put her finger on it, but there’s something-

A pillow strikes her head and shoulder, knocking her right out of her thoughts.

“You mean like _chores_?” Eden asks, lifting the pillow for another blow.

“Yes,” Jemma laughs, “like chores.” She catches the pillow and returns it to her bed, then stands to tuck in her sheets before dressing.

Chores are much the same as every morning. Once the bunks are made, the girls disperse to feed and tend the animals before regrouping in the dining hall for the breakfast the men have prepared. Afterward, they clean the dishes before dispersing a second time, some to the fields to work, some to the pastures to watch the flocks, some even into town, but Jemma’s work is in the warehouse.

Even early in the day, the heat is thick, trapped in the warehouse air. Sweat beads on her brow and her thin cotton blouse clings and the sway of her skirt about her legs is one of her few comforts. She spends the day analyzing samples and giving her suggestions for alterations to the formula. However, she won’t be the one implementing those changes or even observing the results. That work happens in the city.

It isn’t a real city, it’s just what she and the other girls call it. The city sits on the north side of the valley and unlike the farm—the area Jemma and the others live in—which follows the dips and slopes of the land, the city has carved out its space. Jemma’s only seen it twice—once when she arrived and once when she held Cove’s arm in place after that plowing accident two summers ago—but both times it seemed much the same. Identical mobile buildings up on concrete blocks, arranged on either side of a dirt road which leads to the highway.

Jemma prefers the farm with its green pastures and easy camaraderie.

At midday there are lessons. Today is is Gordon come to act as mouthpiece and the children delight in trying to catch him unawares and in the display of his powers once he is finished regaling them with tales of glories to come.

Work resumes in the afternoon and then the evening brings recitations and sleep and then another day begins.

The ache in her head lingers, settling between her shoulder blades and even, briefly, flaring in her leg as though that makes any sense. Aside from that though, the days continue on as they always have.

Until, that is, she is summoned.

She and Aurora are laughing in the dining hall, flicking their rags at one another so drops of water will fly off, when suddenly Aurora’s shriek of glee dies. She composes herself swiftly, bowing her head and clasping her hands respectfully before her. Jemma turns—and immediately does the same when she sees the clothing their visitor wears.

Acolytes like Jemma have strict limitations on their dress, but Inhumans may wear whatever they wish and often stick to the styles they wore before joining the One.

“Jemma?” The gentle voice is familiar. Alicia is often on duty in the warehouse; Jemma knows her—not _well_ , perhaps, but she is more familiar with her than with any of the Inhumans. “Come with me.”

Despite the kindness in the order, Jemma finds herself throwing a fearful look to Aurora. She can think of nothing she’s done wrong, but perhaps she’s overlooked something, some order she was meant to follow but failed to. Aurora gestures her to _move_ and Jemma’s feet are spurred to motion. She follows Alicia to the idling truck, already loaded up with acolytes heading into town for the day. As soon as the both of them are on board, it sets off.

No one speaks to Jemma or even looks at her twice, but she knows they must all be thinking of her. Their journey typically takes them west, through the hills and to the main road, but today they go north to the road through the city. She can be the only reason for the change.

Once in the city, the driver stops without being ordered and Alicia pulls Jemma off alongside her. The rest travel on.

Jemma looks to her for guidance through the settling dust, but finds as soon as she can see her clearly that the Inhuman woman has taken up the same posture of respect Aurora did earlier. For the second time, Jemma finds herself scrambling to honor one of her betters, only this time her fear has tripled and leaves her heart pounding near loud enough to drown out all sound. But not quite, as she still hears the voice which accompanies the boots her eyes are fixed on.

“You need not be frightened, Jemma.”

Excitement flares alongside her anxiety. He knows her name!

“I only wish to speak to you.” She feels a faint sense of _something_ settle on her hair, not a touch but almost the feeling that she’s being watched. It urges her to lift her head and, with some trepidation, she does so. He’s smiling at her. “Come.”

She does. Without hesitation.

They pass close by one of the buildings, protected briefly from the sun by its shade, and then onward over the dry ground, past where the last tire tracks run. She wonders if he means to take her into the wilds, if this is to be some sort of test, but he stops long before they reach the untamed trees.

Alicia is gone, she realizes as she stumbles to a halt. Left behind in the city, she imagines. But there’s no point worrying about her, not when there are obviously more important matters at hand.

He’s stopped several feet ahead, coming to stand so that he is partially facing her, but his focus is on the ground. There, a solitary flower has forced its way out of the sun-cracked earth. Were it not for a stand of stones nearby, Jemma imagines it would have baked to death long ago.

“What do you see?” he asks.

She starts, looking from him to the flower and back again. “I don’t-” She doesn’t understand. Is this some sort of test? “A daisy?” she offers. He raises an eyebrow and she hurries to amend her response. “Bellis perennis is the scientific name, I believe. But I’m not a botanist.” He paces away. “I could brush up though, if you need me to be.” 

Hands clasped behind his back, he faces her again. “That is all this means to you?”

She looks to the flower again. She _hates_ failing. She never met a test she couldn’t pass before—a test she _wouldn’t_ pass with enough time and effort—and she finds she has yet to learn how to fail now. “I suppose it says something about triumph over adversity.” She thinks of the lessons, then of her own work, brightening as she does so. “Of becoming more than is initially expected of you!”

He is smiling at her again. Not with the detached grace of a leader but with an almost personal pride. Has she got it right then?

“Do you remember how you first came here? To be one of my followers?”

She feels a ridiculous flare of her own pride to be called _his_ , but tamps it down to focus on the question (and on keeping her cheeks from turning bright red). “Of course,” she says readily. “You saved my life.”

Hydra had risen up, was taking over the Academy, and he and his people appeared in the midst of it all. They fought back, rescued who they could. Many refused their help or even fought against their rescuers—she still remembers the pain and terror of those moments, seeing good agents die simply out of fear and prejudice—but she was in no state to refuse or even accept help. She had already been shot in the initial attack and could do nothing but fade into unconsciousness. When she awoke she was in one of the mobile buildings, bandaged and recovering. After a time, she was freely offered the means to leave, but chose to stay when she learned what had become of the outside world.

It isn’t much, but it is sanctuary against Hydra. And, with luck, her research will one day grant them the means to fight back, to ensure the entire world joins the One.

“I can never thank you enough,” she says.

He looks once more to the flower and she follows his gaze, still confused as to what it means or even why she’s here, but when she meets his eyes again he seems to have forgotten it. “I have waited for this day,” he says, “ever since you came to us.”

A chill of anticipation rolls over her. Before she can ask what he means, he is before her, close enough to touch, close enough she can feel the heat of him. His hands wrap around her hips, so tight she wonders if he thinks she would run from him.

“What?” She doesn’t know what this is. Nothing in all her years here has prepared her for being this close to him, not in this way at any rate. “Master?” she asks, using the closest thing to a name she has ever heard anyone call him by.

“This will not be thanks,” he says, a touch sternly. “I have wanted you far longer than you can imagine and I will not have only your returned favor. If you and I are to do this, I will have all of you.”

She blinks, attempting to think through the drumbeat in her veins and the way every jolt of pain in her hips flies straight to her core to ignite a lovely sort of pleasure. “Are you- are you asking me?”

Some of her hair has come loose, likely in the ride across the valley, and he brushes it over her ear. “If you wish, you may return to the farmland and this will never be spoken of again. But if you wish to stay, with me, I am warning you that I will not be able to let you go. Not again.”

She wonders what that means, but his fingers against her neck drag her attention back to him. “I like the farm,” she says. “It’s beautiful.”

His grip loosens and she finds herself doing the impossible: grabbing his shirt to hold him close. His beatific smile edges on dangerous.

“I wouldn’t want to leave it forever,” she says softly.

His forehead touches hers and his fingers find the hollow of her hip, applying just the right amount of pressure to turn her knees to gelatin. She gasps and clings to him for support.

“You may go wherever you wish,” he says, speaking the words directly into her ear in between kisses. “This entire valley will be yours as it is mine.” He knows just the right way to touch her so that every thought goes out of her head. She can barely keep track of what he’s saying. “And soon,” he promises while he lays her down and lifts her skirts, “the world.”

Later she will realize her headache has finally faded, gone like it never was.

 

 

 

He watches her doze beneath the stand of stones. The intrepid daisy was crushed by their union and he imagines much the same fate awaits Daisy herself. Not that it matters to him what becomes of her. In death, he has learned to be selfish as he was not in life. He knows his people still suffer, still struggle, but there is not enough of him to exist in that world, it was a miracle he found this half-reality to call his own after what SHIELD and Lincoln left of him.

He brushes Jemma’s hair from her face lest it wake her. It feels like years he’s waited for her true self to arrive to supplant the artifice. But now she is finally here and that can only mean things in the outside world are progressing. Soon Ophelia will have what she wants from this reality and leave it forever to his tender mercies. It will not be quite the paradise he spent so long dreaming of, but with Jemma—a Jemma who loves and adores him as is his due—here and his, he cannot imagine a better afterlife.

 


End file.
